[ibigb]

Q1) Is apple responding to government lawmakers:

EARN IT seeks to deal with the scourge of online child exploitation by coercing service providers to more aggressively police such content on their platforms. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/339... Similar laws in UK and others.

Maybe this will short circuit the need for a government backdoor to snoop in icloud photos?

Q2) Didn't people agree to no illegal KP with the icloud TOS? Doesn't all this do is move the scanning from apple's servers to the distributed ARM processors?

Q3) Is that more environmentally friendly or less? I am sure it is cheaper for apple to have the iphone scan than add additional servers, cooling, space, etc.

If one doesn't use icloud photos this does not affect them, for now.