I honestly believe that's not Apple's place. Apple is a technology company, not a non-profit founded to help find missing or abused children. NCMEC has a prett

I honestly believe that's not Apple's place. Apple is a technology company, not a non-profit founded to help find missing or abused children. NCMEC has a pretty good and non-controversial reputation and you really only heard about it if you were working in that kind of law enforcement field. Or you knew of the database if you were personally working on tech for filtering and managing submission of photo/video from the public, like facebook image uploads and had to manage submitting reports of found CSAM. I personally only knew of the amber alerts, which are national broadcast messages that show up on my phone informing of cases of serious abduction incidents. I think for people informed about tech, the most unpopular thing about NCMEC is their stance on promoting a backdoor in all E2E encryption to ensure CSAM is flagged. [1] But even that, you understand where they're coming from even if you believe that backdoors are a bad idea. The NCMEC is a government funded non-profit for the explicit purpose of finding missing and exploited children. It's just not Apple's place unless it will also have a department for the explicit purpose of finding missing and exploited children. And at that point it's a branch of NCMEC working in Apple. Child protective services isn't NCMEC. And NCMEC isn't law enforcement, the organization works with law enforcement and doesn't directly go after anyone. I have never heard of people that have gotten into serious trouble because of overeager employees. I wasn't able to find it via google either, I would love to get more information if you have a link. I have heard of three letter government agencies allegedly planting CSAM on targets they want to get leverage on. But whether actual CSAM is planted or they lie in order to get probable cause to do searches and intimidate, I'm not sure. This article from 2019 outlines an instance where law enforcement accused someone of handling CSAM based on filenames and an IP address, but weren't able to find the file after doing an actual search on the device. [2] They ended up dropping the case instead of letting the lawyers examine the method used tag alleged predators. They actually dropped cases instead of disclosing how the software worked multiple times for the sake of protecting how the software works, and arguably let alleged predators walk free. But all of that is separate from NCMEC which just handles a cyber tipline and follows up on reports from tech companies about any potential CSAM and is in charge of handling the database of known positives in the US. Apple has stated they will require the database to be cross-checked across different countries and jurisdictions in order to ensure no one can add false matches. So they don't want to identify CSAM for just the US, they want it to be a global program even if they are just rolling it out in the US. 1. https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/end-to-end-encryption https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/end-to-end-encryption 2. https://www.propublica.org/article/prosecutors-dropping-child-porn-charges-after-software-tools-are-questioned https://www.propublica.org/article/prosecutors-dropping-chil...