Apple has been working on end-to-end encrypted iCloud since at least 2018 [1]. In fact they’ve been gradually implementing it since 2015. They finally deployed ADP in 2022. It is ludicrous to believe that in 2021 they designed a client-side photo scanning system whose only conceivable purpose is to be part of an end-to-end encrypted backup system, and yet also believe that system was not intended to be part of their ongoing (and ultimately successful) encryption rollout.

I guess back in 2021 we had to pretend to believe things like that, because Apple hadn’t yet announced ADP and was refusing to admit they planned an encryption rollout. But they’ve gone and rolled ADP out now: we can stop pretending to believe silly things. Obviously ADP was being planned, and obviously the CSAM scanner was intended to work with it. It got dropped due to the public backlash. A relatively short 16 months later ADP rolled out without it. End of story.

If it pleases you to believe that Apple designed a scanning system that just happened to work with encrypted backup, but intended to turn it off for users who enabled encrypted backup… go ahead and believe that. I would just say, in the most polite way, that maybe if the positive case for Apple’s CSAM proposal requires one to believe such unlikely things, perhaps it is not a very strong case at all.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...