[brasscodemonkey]

Hasn’t Google been parsing Google Photos images, email content, and pretty much everything else since forever? Do you just stay off of smartphones and cloud platforms entirely?

[fh973]

Microsoft and Google have been doing that in their online services for ages, but not on your personal devices.

[brasscodemonkey]

So if I don’t backup with Google Photos or Google Drive, would they be safe for now?

[vineyardmike]

yes theoretically.

[sathackr]

They scan things I send them.

They don't (publicly announce that they) scan things on my device.

[dwaite]

The Apple feature discussed here is for photos being synched to iCloud Photos. It does not scan arbitrary local content.

[giantrobot]

> It does not scan arbitrary local content.

Yet.

Before it was "only content uploaded to iCloud is scanned" and now it's "photos are scanned on-device". That's frog boiling that tomorrow easily becomes "arbitrary files are scanned anywhere on the device".

[dwaite]

Only photos being uploaded to iCloud are scanned on device for CE imagery. This is the alternative to having cloud storage having broad decryption ability to do scanning in-service (as say Microsoft, Google, Twitter, and Facebook do)

[hippari]

They already can decrypt iCloud photos, why else perform an on-device scan ? If not with the intention to scan all local contents ?

[sathackr]

And the matching photo is uploaded upon match. So regardless the photo is uploaded. What's the point again of taking this further step?

[dwaite]

That is an EXCELLENT question, fwiw.

They could have just had a local failure. I suspect there were a lot of arguments around this point - should they be making an attempt merely to prevent such content from their servers, or to detect/report behaviors which may be illegal and harmful.

[vineyardmike]

It also scans every photo that an iMessage user sends/receives.