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Comment by high_derivative | Hacker News Reader

Im really starting to develop a visceral hatred for Apple.

They are talking sanctimoniously about privacy out of one end of their mouth, put on a family friendly face by banning anything offending prude sensibilities, while having no qualms about doing as much business as they possibly can in China. Now this.

They are the ultimative dystopian corporation, I find them even worse than Facebook in that regard, at least Facebook has some interest in free speech and does not operate in China.

I guess the reason I am so angry is that I like the devices and engineering marvels they can produce. But I cannot be a customer of this.

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> at least Facebook has some interest in free speech and does not operate in China.

That wasn’t really their choice, and they’ve been trying to find a way back into the market since the day they were banned. They still make billions of dollars every year on ads from Chinese buyers that run globally.

It's almost comical when you go back and watch their "1984" ad

I wouldn't use Facebook as a pillar of privacy.. in any way shape or form.

Further, they are looking into doing something similar as Apple:

https://bgr.com/tech/whatsapp-refuses-to-use-facebooks-creep...

> Most cloud services — Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft to name a few — already scan user files for content that might violate their terms of service or be potentially illegal, like CSAM.

There's an expectation that what you upload on the cloud will get some scrutiny, being on somebody else machine.

But here they'll scan the local files on your own device, that you supposedly "own" (but not really, because Apple already locked it up to make sure you can only install stuff they have approved and taken a cut off)

this is false. it's not scanning your local files.

only the files you upload to apple photos.

The compute is on the edge; the data is local, just marked for cloud sync. This way, you get to pay for the capital and energy costs of the scanning instead of Apple.

Am I misunderstanding that this is the literal last step for a photo destined for iCloud, and a way to keep apple from having to decrypt your private photos to scan them? With iCloud sync off, does this scan still happen?

Correct. Functionally there is no difference to what Google does with their own cloud photo service. The only difference is where the processing occurs.

Turning off cloud photo syncing will disable the scan on both Android and iOS.

It's only a matter of time until this comes to non-Apple devices as well, I think. Personally, I'm biding my time with Android phones hoping that phones where I personally control the software running on them can become usable.

Mark Zuckerberg famously asked Xi Jinping to name his daughter. Cultural taboos aside, Facebook would love LOVE LOVE to operate in China.

Facebook wanted to enter China AF but China is smart not to allow it. Zuck had since sort of given up and become less friendly to China.

Facebook helped build the guide rails that led to genocide.. not sure why you would look to them for anything.

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