I want to ignore most of this article to complain about an inaccuracy that keeps coming up.
> More broadly, they said the change will break end-to-end encryption for iMessage, which Apple has staunchly defended in other contexts.
But... it wouldn't. The iMessage feature doesn't expose the contents of your message to anyone else under any circumstance.
If you're a child under 13 and your parents have opted in to this feature, you get a choice of seeing naked-pictures sent to you and having your parents be notified that you chose to, and bypassing it with no notifications of anything. (But once you're 13+, no notifications would occur.)
There are potential issues with this, mostly relating to abusive families being controlling. They'd have to do weird things like forcing their teenaged children to keep making new under-13 accounts to actually take advantage of it like that, though. And none of these issues impact the e2e status of iMessage in any way.
Apple really screwed up PR by launching the iMessage feature alongside the scanning-and-reporting iCloud Photos feature. There's so much confusion out there about this.
(The breaking-e2e aspect does exist with the iCloud Photos scanning... not that it's currently e2e, of course.)
> More broadly, they said the change will break end-to-end encryption for iMessage, which Apple has staunchly defended in other contexts.
But... it wouldn't. The iMessage feature doesn't expose the contents of your message to anyone else under any circumstance.
If you're a child under 13 and your parents have opted in to this feature, you get a choice of seeing naked-pictures sent to you and having your parents be notified that you chose to, and bypassing it with no notifications of anything. (But once you're 13+, no notifications would occur.)
There are potential issues with this, mostly relating to abusive families being controlling. They'd have to do weird things like forcing their teenaged children to keep making new under-13 accounts to actually take advantage of it like that, though. And none of these issues impact the e2e status of iMessage in any way.
Apple really screwed up PR by launching the iMessage feature alongside the scanning-and-reporting iCloud Photos feature. There's so much confusion out there about this.
(The breaking-e2e aspect does exist with the iCloud Photos scanning... not that it's currently e2e, of course.)