What has changed again? The practical state is that photos are uploaded in the clear to iCloud today, and Apple can scan them if they want or more importantly i

What has changed again? The practical state is that photos are uploaded in the clear to iCloud today, and Apple can scan them if they want or more importantly if the US Government asks and with any valid subpoena must hand them over. Consider the this new hypothetical future state: 1) photos are encrypted on iCloud 2) photos are hash scanned before being encrypted and uploaded. In this new state no valid subpoena can get access to the encrypted photos on iCloud without also getting the key on your device. What is your metric where this is not a better state than the current state where every photo is available in the clear to any government that asks and must be preserved when given a valid order to do so? If you don’t upload photos to iCloud there is no change. In all scenarios you have to trust Apple to write software that does what they say and that they won’t write software in response to a subpoena to target you specifically. The attack with the hash scanning is someone gets a hash for something in your photos specifically (that doesn’t match a ton of people) and through some means gets it into the database (plausible), but can’t get anything without going though this route. Specifically subpoenas can’t just get all your photos without going through this route. My conclusion is that you are more protected in the hash scan and encrypt state than in current state.