I assumed the hair they're splitting is it's your own device that's doing the scanning, and not "Apple". Meaning, their iCloud servers won't scan your photos. T

I assumed the hair they're splitting is it's your own device that's doing the scanning, and not "Apple". Meaning, their iCloud servers won't scan your photos. They want people to read that as "oh, I thought my pictures were going to get scanned without my say so, I guess that was just wrong and this is a false alarm", but what is actually going to happen is that you are going to scan your pictures, then send Apple a hash. To be clear, this is a distinction without a meaningful difference. Or, if there is a difference, it's that it's actually worse than the alternative (cf. the Stratechery article that's been making the rounds). If that's right, then this isn't a lie, but it's incredibly mealy-mouthed, misleading, and disrespectful of their customers' intelligence.