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> From the point of view of the privacy of your photos, I fail to see what the difference between the two is. Good point. The question is privacy "from whom".

> From the point of view of the privacy of your photos, I fail to see what the difference between the two is. Good point. The question is privacy "from whom". For me, privacy "from apple" means mostly from malicious individuals working for Apple (indeed, if you have an iPhone running proprietary Apple software, you could never truly have privacy from Apple the corporation). There are documented cases of employees at various cloud services[0] using their positions of power to spy on users of said services. Performing on-server scanning implies that servers regularly decrypt users' encrypted data as a routine course (or worse, never encrypt it in the first place), which provides additional attack vectors for such rogue employees. On the other hand, taking the on-device scanning as described, the on-device scanning process couldn't be possibly used as an attack vector by a rogue employee, since Apple employees do not physically control your device. Maybe an attack vector here involves changing the code and pushing a malicious build, which is a monumentally difficult task (and already an attack vector today). [0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extract-facebooks-engineers-spied-women/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/12/exclusive-extrac...

JohnFen 5y ago
> The question is privacy "from whom". For me, privacy means that I have control over who I disclose what to. But context matters. If I'm in my own house, I (should) have almost total control over disclosure. When I'm in someone else's house, I have very little control as I'm subjecting myself to their rules. A smartphone is probably the most intimate, personal device most people will ever own, and it's the equivalent of their house. However, if you're using cloud services, then you're in someone else's house and are subject to their rules. That's why, in my view, doing the scanning on-device is not only dangerous, but unethical. Doing the scanning on the servers is neither of those things. I get the argument about rogue employees, but I don't find it persuasive. I'm told that Apple keeps your data encrypted on their servers, although they hold the keys. If that's so, then "rogue employees" are something that Apple can, and should, control.

JohnFen 5y ago

> The question is privacy "from whom". For me, privacy means that I have control over who I disclose what to. But context matters. If I'm in my own house, I (should) have almost total control over disclosure. When I'm in someone else's house, I have very little control as I'm subjecting myself to their rules. A smartphone is probably the most intimate, personal device most people will ever own, and it's the equivalent of their house. However, if you're using cloud services, then you're in someone else's house and are subject to their rules. That's why, in my view, doing the scanning on-device is not only dangerous, but unethical. Doing the scanning on the servers is neither of those things. I get the argument about rogue employees, but I don't find it persuasive. I'm told that Apple keeps your data encrypted on their servers, although they hold the keys. If that's so, then "rogue employees" are something that Apple can, and should, control.