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If you and I can tell this after the decision was made, imagine how their ultra highly educated and experienced consultants and development team wouldn't see th

If you and I can tell this after the decision was made, imagine how their ultra highly educated and experienced consultants and development team wouldn't see this coming. They knew exactly how we would react, but they went with it. Call me conspiracy theorist, they must have been forced so badly to make this kind of a change.

sneak 5y ago
My theory is that they want to do e2e and this is the only way that they wouldn't be punished by the USG for doing so. This also means that if you get big enough, you lose your 1A rights in the USA because the feds will punish you extralegally if you do things they don't like or that make life harder for them. Sad state of affairs in the USA.
- system2 5y ago
  That is true, there is no absolute freedom. But I also think instead of twisting their arms, feds simply give them enough incentive to do it. Imagine a company completely supported by the government. There is no shortage of money, no risk of getting bankrupt, big contracts between government bodies, even better infrastructure support. How much can they lose by doing this? I don't think much.
  - novok 5y ago
    Apple does not make significant income from the US government where the loss of them as a customer would materially affect their revenues.
    - fmajid 5y ago
      The government has other forms of coercion available. Just look at what happened to Joe Nacchio, former CEO of telco Qwest, for refusing to cooperate with George W. Bush's illegal wiretapping program.
- fmajid 5y ago
  I think this is actually motivated by upcoming EU legislation that would mandate CSAM filtering by cloud storage providers. They tried hard to engineer a solution that would provide some guarantees, but doing the processing client-side sets an even more damaging precedent. The same guarantees might have been doable purely server-side using homomorphic encryption but that tech is still very nascent and not deployed at the scale of iCloud.

sneak 5y ago

My theory is that they want to do e2e and this is the only way that they wouldn't be punished by the USG for doing so. This also means that if you get big enough, you lose your 1A rights in the USA because the feds will punish you extralegally if you do things they don't like or that make life harder for them. Sad state of affairs in the USA.

system2 5y ago
That is true, there is no absolute freedom. But I also think instead of twisting their arms, feds simply give them enough incentive to do it. Imagine a company completely supported by the government. There is no shortage of money, no risk of getting bankrupt, big contracts between government bodies, even better infrastructure support. How much can they lose by doing this? I don't think much.
- novok 5y ago
  Apple does not make significant income from the US government where the loss of them as a customer would materially affect their revenues.
  - fmajid 5y ago
    The government has other forms of coercion available. Just look at what happened to Joe Nacchio, former CEO of telco Qwest, for refusing to cooperate with George W. Bush's illegal wiretapping program.
fmajid 5y ago
I think this is actually motivated by upcoming EU legislation that would mandate CSAM filtering by cloud storage providers. They tried hard to engineer a solution that would provide some guarantees, but doing the processing client-side sets an even more damaging precedent. The same guarantees might have been doable purely server-side using homomorphic encryption but that tech is still very nascent and not deployed at the scale of iCloud.