[jasonlfunk]

Yeah, but they are already doing this for pointless things. They already use facial recognition on all the photos on your phone. That’s what I don’t understand. The only new thing is what they are looking for and their willingness to alert the authorities. The slippery slope argument that this will eventually be used by China to arrest journalists is scare tactics. We have zero evidence that Apple would allow such a thing to happen. And the only thing stopping them is Apple’s word. The fact that they are announcing this should actually give confidence that they aren’t doing it in the shadows for China. They didn’t have to say anything about this. The fact that they should give you confidence that they are respecting your rights, not evidence that they aren’t.

[ique]

Apple has caved to china many many times, a quick googling of it will give you a list.

The difference between the "old" content scanning and the new is indeed that they are now willing to "use" the results of that. Facial recognition was client-side only (or so they said), the results of which never left your phone.

Now they're doing content scanning and sending it to themselves as well as others.

In parallel Apple is starting up a growing advertising business, hiring aggressively and expecting that to be a big part of their future revenue. If they're now "allowed" (by its users) to do content scanning _and_ sharing the results, why wouldn't they use those results for themselves to target you with ads?

[mtrovo]

i think the remote execution with a remote hash database is the key part thay you need to focus. Checking for faces is something that doesn't need much information outside your phone itself.

What Apple is proposing is basically adding a feature to scan any user's phone for a collection of hashes. Even if they say they will only use this for CSAM this sends a strong message to all government agencies around the world that the capability is over there. Maybe for US citizens this doesn't sound dangerous but if I was a minority or a critic of the government on a more authoritarian country I would jump ship from Apple products right away.