In my view, Apple is not going to take the risk of changing their mind and not implementing this new scanning feature in order to test the hypothesis that you c

In my view, Apple is not going to take the risk of changing their mind and not implementing this new scanning feature in order to test the hypothesis that you can satisfy both the people who want to stop CSAM and the people who don't want their files scanned. And also, Apple or any other company announcing they will not scan or give up any user data means that criminals, foolish or not, will take notice and start uploading CSAM to their servers. If they get away with it, they've found their new home. That's why regulation against this kind of data exists. Possessing CSAM is still a felony. Nobody is arguing about the legality of CSAM itself. It's an issue that is not popular to discuss, and of course being on the wrong side of it results in near-universal, justifiable derision. Stopping its spread is absolutely the right thing to do. So at the point that companies will always be held liable for storing it, they will have to put up countermeasures of some kind or find themselves sued out of existence. Server-side scanning is one method, and Apple's on-device scanning is another. There are certainly ways that Apple can go too far with whatever it happens to come up with as its solution to stopping CSAM, but there is still seems to have been a line behind which nobody particularly cares how the detection is implemented and life continues as usual. If Apple had chosen not to cross that line, maybe many of the arguments being made here would never have been brought up at all.