Anyone who engaged in such a discussion with a non-technical person is going to defacto seem like an advocate for child pornography, similar to how advocating for encryption can easily be twisted to being pro-crime.
Having said that, there is an enormous amount of misinformation and fear-mongering about a pretty tame change. This seems like so much ado about very close to nothing.
a) They optionally scan messaged photos for nudity using a NN if the participants are children and in a family (the account grouping), and the group adult(s) have opted in, giving children warnings and information if they send or receive such material. A+++ thumbs up.
b) They scan photos that you've uploaded to iCloud (available at photos.icloud.com, unencrypted -- in the E2E sense, effectively "plaintext" from Apple's perspective -- etc) for known CP hashes. Bizarrely Apple decided to scan these on device as well, causing 99% of the outrage and confusion, yet every major cloud photo service in the world does such checks for the same reason, whether you have the photo set to private or not, and presumably Apple decided to do it on device simply as free distributed computing, taking advantage of hundreds of millions of high performance chips, but most importantly as a PR move demonstrating that "Apple Silicon helps with Child Safety", etc.
That's it. Various "this is a harbinger of doom and tomorrow they're going to..." arguments are unconvincing. This does absolutely nothing to break or subvert E2E encryption or on device privacy.
EDIT: The moderation of this comment has been fascinating, going to double digits, down to negatives, back up again, etc.
Having said that, there is an enormous amount of misinformation and fear-mongering about a pretty tame change. This seems like so much ado about very close to nothing.
a) They optionally scan messaged photos for nudity using a NN if the participants are children and in a family (the account grouping), and the group adult(s) have opted in, giving children warnings and information if they send or receive such material. A+++ thumbs up.
b) They scan photos that you've uploaded to iCloud (available at photos.icloud.com, unencrypted -- in the E2E sense, effectively "plaintext" from Apple's perspective -- etc) for known CP hashes. Bizarrely Apple decided to scan these on device as well, causing 99% of the outrage and confusion, yet every major cloud photo service in the world does such checks for the same reason, whether you have the photo set to private or not, and presumably Apple decided to do it on device simply as free distributed computing, taking advantage of hundreds of millions of high performance chips, but most importantly as a PR move demonstrating that "Apple Silicon helps with Child Safety", etc.
That's it. Various "this is a harbinger of doom and tomorrow they're going to..." arguments are unconvincing. This does absolutely nothing to break or subvert E2E encryption or on device privacy.
EDIT: The moderation of this comment has been fascinating, going to double digits, down to negatives, back up again, etc.