I see it as Apple taking voluntary steps to prevent the Earn IT Act (or something similar) from becoming law in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_A

I see it as Apple taking voluntary steps to prevent the Earn IT Act (or something similar) from becoming law in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act_of_2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act_of_2020 Big tech companies are under a lot of US govt pressure right now to crack down on CSAM, most especially Apple because of their very low number of reports compared to most other tech giants. I think Apple saw this as a way to ease some of that government pressure while not jeopardizing their ability to use end-to-end encryption, which something like the EARN IT Act could effectively make illegal by requiring a government backdoor for all encrypted cloud services that operate in the US. Apple probably saw the on-device CSAM scanning as a small, widely-acceptable concession to make that could prevent much bigger crackdowns, but maybe didn't anticipate the level of blowback from people seeing the CSAM scanning itself as an unacceptable government backdoor on their own device.