Since they cannot convince users to enable this feature in good-faith, they are resorting to subterfuge. We know that Apple is vehement about pushing client-side scanning on users that do not want it, I do not believe for a second that this was a mistake or unintended behavior. If this was a bug then it would have been hotfixed immediately to prevent the unintended behavior from reaching any more phones than it already had.
This is illogical. If Apple wanted to engage in subterfuge they would simply compromise the OS.
When a company controls the entire stack either you trust everything they do. Or nothing.
If anything, the lesson Apple might take from this could be "adding the settings toggle was a bad idea, because nobody would have cared about this at all otherwise".
They worked very hard on security these past few months, so it should be all good, right?
I am not claiming for one moment that enabling this by default is OK. In fact, I have explicitly said it is not.
What I am saying is that it is ignorant to call this a cover up, because a cover up requires subterfuge. This feature has a freaking settings toggle and public documentation. Calling it a cover up is the type of uneducated rhetoric that makes these issues being brushed off by those in power as “it’s just a bunch of loonies conspiracy theorists complaining”.
Clearly you have not. If you did, you wouldn’t continue to give an example which is not equivalent.
No, it would not be “perfectly fine”, I just said it wouldn’t. You can do something wrong without it being a cover up.
Irrelevant.
This is Apple's proprietary software, running on Apple's computers, devices which use cryptography to prevent you from inspecting it or running software they don't control. Very few people have any idea how it actually works or what it actually does.
That there's some "public document" describing it is not evidence of anything.
> that’s not a reason to immediately assume bad faith
The mere existence of this setting is evidence of bad faith. The client side scanning nonsense proved controversial despite their use of children as political weapons. That they went ahead and did this despite the controversy removes any possible innocence. It tells you straight up that they cannot be trusted.
> Even the author of the article is concerned more about bugs than intentions.
We'll draw our own conclusions.
That’s starting to veer into unreasonable levels of conspiracy theory. There’s nothing to “cover up”, the feature has an off switch right in the Settings and a public document explaining how it works. It should not be on by default but that’s not a reason to immediately assume bad faith. Even the author of the article is concerned more about bugs than intentions.