damn, I was thinking of getting an iphone. Now I'm thinking of ditching the entire apple ecosystem altogether.
The idea that apple can scan files on my system without my consent is pretty sickening. I don't care what its purportedly used for. This is a slippery slope to all sorts of privacy violations.
Apple is putting the entire database on every phone to scan and promising to only do it for certain situations. They can alter that deal at any time, you’d have to be a fool to think that isn’t their plan.
On-device scanning of “encrypted” cloud content where Apple has always held the key makes 0 sense unless your plan is total device surveillance.
Apple already controls the entire photos pipeline on your device, and in fact all of the OS code. If they want total device surveillance, they've got it today.
They're doing this because they are announcing it, because they think it's a net positive. You might not agree, but the argument that this is somehow creating the technology for scanning and is therefore nefarious is missing the point that if they wanted to do this surreptitiously and nefariously, they (a) wouldn't announce it and (b) could have been doing it for years. This isn't some fancy new tech, except for the privacy bits, which obviously wouldn't apply to Evil Schemes.
The idea that apple can scan files on my system without my consent is pretty sickening. I don't care what its purportedly used for. This is a slippery slope to all sorts of privacy violations.