| > Once again, the notion that everything on the device is scanned under Apple's system was never true. That isn't what I said. Also, that's not why most people are so upset. Most people are so upset mainly because Apple has now proven that the capability exists, so they can now be more easily compelled by governments to scan for "extra things". Prior to this, if a government asked Apple to scan someone's phone, Apple could respond with "we don't have that capability", and it would presumably be a tough legal battle to force a company to add a capability that doesn't exist. This hurdle is now much lower. The effort has gone from "force Apple to design a new system for scanning phones" to "add these couple of hashes to the pre-existing database". Also, expanding this from just iCloud upload candidates to the entire device is a very small leap now. I mean, the bad guys could just turn off iCloud, and we must think of the children... Then you have Apple's "reassurance" that they won't comply with government requests to scan for additional things, which is completely moot considering Apple relies on a third party database and has absolutely no control or idea of what the hashes really are. |
If you have a false positive on device, nothing is sent to Apple's servers. It takes several (possibly false) positives at once to trigger a human review.
If you have a single false positive on server, that data is sitting there where it can be subpoenaed and abused.
Also, recent history shows that Apple is willing to fight government demands to invade user privacy in court.