This is great news for individuals who don’t want companies snooping on their private images and don’t want to get ensnared with legal issues due to false positives. It also ensures a barrier against governments demanding scanning for dissident material and the like.
But let’s not pretend it’s a move that doesn’t come with a cost. Scanning for CSAM by companies does catch a lot of child abusers and result in children being rescued from abuse, and it’s likely that Apple implementing such scanning would have done the same.
But let’s not pretend it’s a move that doesn’t come with a cost. Scanning for CSAM by companies does catch a lot of child abusers and result in children being rescued from abuse, and it’s likely that Apple implementing such scanning would have done the same.