Baseless speculation: this is less about ongoing protection against keeping CSAM on their servers and more about a one-time sting operation requested by some so

Baseless speculation: this is less about ongoing protection against keeping CSAM on their servers and more about a one-time sting operation requested by some sort of acronym’d official. The basic idea being: have a bunch of catfish agents send out these known CSAM images to folks through anonymous channels (sourcing the targets would likely be unfortunately trivial), expect that some of them will save the images and be synced to iCloud, coerce Apple into letting them see who has the material, sting them. To this end, I would not be at all surprised to see that in some not-too-distant future Apple issues a big ol’ public apology and removes this feature. The operation will of course be long complete by then. Just writing this out here so I have a “I told you so” link for if/when that time comes :)