> At the moment Apple's scanning policy is about the same as it was before. They claim they're only scanning photos if iCloud photos are enabled. The change the

> At the moment Apple's scanning policy is about the same as it was before. They claim they're only scanning photos if iCloud photos are enabled. The change they're advertising is doing the actual scanning process locally. Major difference is, that they have no access for other images anymore as they used to have. They leave device as encrypted. Images used to be plaintext in the eyes of Apple. > The problem is two fold. The first is Apple went from scanning only explicitly uploaded content to local content. Since they've decided to intrude on local content once "for the children" it's not out of the realm of possibility (if not likely) they will make further intrusions in the future for prima facie noble reasons. Are third party apps going to be restricted on saving data unless they allow access to Apple's CSAM scanner? Will it start scanning texts or e-mails tomorrow letting and rando flood a person's phone with CSAM and get them arrested? Adding a local scanning system like this is a slippery slope. Emails have been scanned for long time in the cloud already. The rest is only speculation and against what they have told. It might be hard to trust, but in closed systems it is all we have. We should be worried when they actually say or start doing that. > There's plenty of places where homosexuality is punishable by death and even mildly anti-government content will land you in jail. It is fair to not trust third parties (NCMEC/ICMEC), but Apple is responsible for making the algorithm and testing that. Misuse must be part of their tests at this level. iCloud photos used to be plaintext so this hasn't changed from that perspective. If there is evidence that they are scanning other images outside of iCloud as well, then we should get the pitchforks and torches. > We don't even have a way of knowing if some image we have tripped a false positive and have to trust Apple's unknown "threshold" isn't 1. So not only does the public, the subject of these new intrusions, have no way of auditing the database but they have no way of auditing the code or process. This isn't true, since all math of their system is public and available on here: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Apple_PSI_System_Security_Protocol_and_Analysis.pdf https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Apple_PSI_System_Secu... But code is as closed as always been. You have same level of trust for iMessage E2EE or even the screen lock of your phone. Due to the way how system is expected to behave (it only looks existing matches from the provided data, with certain modifications), it is certainly possible that 1/1 trillion false positives is reachable, because they can validate it during development. They are not developing some AI to match totally new wild images. There is human validation, so nothing is automatically triggering police.