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by jduckles 1727 days ago
They're only encrypted when on iCloud, not when on your device. The hashes are computed on your device.
1 comments

So how do they capture the unencrypted images from my device for "review"?
That's why the CSAM scanner is on your device. It computes the hashes in place on then unencrypted images before uploading encrypted copies to iCloud.

That's why from some perspectives it is a net privacy win versus Google/Microsoft's similar tools that require them to have decryption backdoor keys on their clouds to process these CSAM requests and other FBI/TLA/et al warrants. Apple is saying they don't have backdoor keys at all on iCloud and if they are forced to do CSAM scanning it has to be on device, without leaving the device to have access to the unencrypted images. Only if you hit the reporting threshold (supposedly 30+ hash violations) would it also encrypt copies to a reporting database on iCloud (and again only if you were uploading those photos to iCloud in the first place).

So, again, how do they review those images? Does Apple have the key to the reporting database?
Yes, that would be why it sends copies, encrypted with a different key to the users' own storage keys.
So in other words, the only thing stopping Apple from viewing my iCloud photos is an if statement.
That would also be true for any use of iCloud Photos, no? If you don't trust this, then you also can't trust them to be storing them encrypted on their servers.