I have no doubt that Apple doesn't really want to implement this, and have tried to find a "non intrusive" way of doing it. The sad truth is that once lawmaker

I have no doubt that Apple doesn't really want to implement this, and have tried to find a "non intrusive" way of doing it. The sad truth is that once lawmakers decide they want access to all data all the time, there's nothing Apple, Google or Microsoft can do to stop that, except going out of business. That being said, the big players in cloud storage have scanned your files for a decade. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they all scan files being uploaded. Apple may also be doing this for iCloud Drive. The only way to circumvent this is to use E2E encryption, either by using a service that has E2E encryption built in, or by "rolling your own", i.e. using Cryptomator. Again, this is just one law away from being outlawed. The thing that bothers me most is that hashes are somewhat trivial to spoof[1], so if someone was to get a hold of the list of hashes, they could start sending spoof messages on a large scale, causing a false positive. I remember when Echelon was making the rounds on the internet a couple of decades ago, and lots of people started adding X headers to their emails to cause false positives. [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/black-box-attacks-on-perceptual-image-hashes-with-gans-cc1be11f277 https://towardsdatascience.com/black-box-attacks-on-perceptu...