The slippery slope argument is no doubt a valid one. But Apple specifically implemented (almost) the CSAM scanning after being threatened by multiple politicians - notably Lindsey Graham - that if they didn’t find a solution that they would legislate a backdoor into the OS for law enforcement. I think Apple was doing everything they could to appease the demand without actually violating users’ privacy. While it’s clear they failed to please end users, the solution itself was pretty ingenious.

Edit: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-commi...

The scanning for known fingerprints in Apple’s scheme only happened sever side.

Unlike Google, Apple didn’t have access to all photos in an unencrypted form to do whatever they pleased with them. If and only if 5 photo fingerprints matched a known csam photo, could Apple view a thumbnail of the photo.

How could that possibly be thought of as worse than Google’s “we can see all your data all the time” approach?

The fingerprinting doesn't happen by magic, your device analyses your photos and sends the results to Apple for control and Apple alert the authorities once enough matches happen because once enough matches happen your photos are decrypted for human inspection.

Inconsequential implementation details. Your device still acts as a snitch for whatever the authorities are looking for. Today looking for CSAM match tomorrow can be environmentalism, abortion, meat products etc - depending on how the politics evolve.

Apple’s severs are the snitches and they can only snitch if you upload five matching fingerprints.

Fine to think that scanning for csam is wrong, but the fact that it’s based on fingerprints sent to the cloud doesn’t make their scheme worse than Google who has access to unencrypted photo data to do whatever they want with (as argued by many in this thread).

Trauma experienced in childhood results in individual’s psychology being messed up in various ways for the remaining life. This messed-uppedness is contagious: it spreads to descendants, peers (school bullying), subordinate people (teacher to student) and so on.

Since I believe that a lot of issues humanity has to deal with come from mental health issues (I like to make this point so I won’t belabor it), I also find “think of the children”, while often misused, on its actual substance not an argument to be ridiculed.

Today I am reminded about The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin a little.

I think the issue here is that CSAM is and often was used as an excuse for invasive privacy breaking measures. Nobody can "not" think of the children, so whenever someone would argue against a measure, all they can say back is "so you don't care about children then?"

And people start getting tired of this serious issue being used, not because the people who want these measures passed care, but because of whatever agenda those people are actually interested.

It is precisely because it is so severe, that it is difficult to say no to measures in favor of it. But that same fact, is abused by people with bad intentions.

I have no desire to promote privacy invasive measures, but like the comment that started the thread: we have to acknowledge the horrible epidemic of this abuse and that the measures proposed would have been effective against it. We should be mindful that detecting and, upon human review (can’t believe how much disinformation was spread on this front), reporting CSAM would have been a good thing if it was entirely side-effect free.

However, we (as a crowd) have decided that those side-effects would be even worse than CSA itself. And perhaps we were right, but it should weigh on our consciences as we were the utilitarianist arbiters that decided individual suffering was not significant enough, and we should not rest as if we’ve “won” because a big problem (to solve which Apple seemed even willing to put its reputation on the line) remains unsolved.

No one is arguing that child porn is not a heinous thing. The argument is that there are also many other crimes that are in the same ballpark of severity, so why only police this one?

My comment explained why I think it is in a different ballpark of badness, maybe you could respond to that.

I never said that it's not an important issue and people shouldn't bother for the wellbeing of children.

I was actually responding to your lamenting how this argument is alive and well. Do you notice how you are self-contradicting?