> Okay, so basically they are just sort of pinky-swearing that your iCloud photos are encrypted on iCloud, but not in any way that prevents Apple or the governm

> Okay, so basically they are just sort of pinky-swearing that your iCloud photos are encrypted on iCloud, but not in any way that prevents Apple or the government from decrypting them anyway. How do you imagine that Google and Microsoft are able to scan the entire contents of your account? They can all read the data on their servers >This raises the followup question of "why bother scanning the images on-device? Because running the scan on device and encrypting the results protects users from having their account associated with the inevitable false positives that are going to crop up. Apple can't decrypt the scan results your device produces until the threshold of 30 matching images is reached. If someone issues a warrant to Apple for every account that has a single match, they can honestly report that they don't have that information. Google and Microsoft give you no such protection. Any data held on their server is wide open for misuse by anyone who can issue a warrant.