I think that so long as there is an argument for arresting people that possess child pornography that the negatives will outweigh the positives in the eyes of t

I think that so long as there is an argument for arresting people that possess child pornography that the negatives will outweigh the positives in the eyes of the people in charge. Preventing child abuse was more important than everyone's complete privacy in Apple's opinion. Maybe it was because one is directly related to the outcome of a human life and the other is a nebulous construct to most people except those in the technology sphere. But those were ultimately Apple's (or the government's) values in this case. I don't think that the phrase "giving up some amount of privacy to stop child abusers" will sound unreasonable to enough other people that don't really understand privacy. The damage to Apple's brand seems to be coming mostly from technologists and the privacy-conscious. Even if only a handful of people are justifiably arrested because of this change, making the tradeoffs not worth it in their eyes, there are still many other people who would believe that catching even a few more child abusers was the right thing to do. Reducing the reasoning to "but think of the children" ignores the fact that there are still reasons that CSAM is declared illegal. It seems that most people on these threads are focusing on the fact that this is a privacy disaster - which is absolutely is - but until there is a viable argument that on-device privacy is more important to the general public than shutting down a market that actively produces evidence of child abuse, I'm pessimistic that this will be walked back. What is needed are studies correlating the spread of CSAM with actual CSA, but they do not exist. At this point it seems to be taken for a fact. The taboo around the subject appears to have disincentivized the creation of such studies.