Sorry, the spyware engine is considered "essential" for regulatory compliance reasons.
You have no idea the inherent power of being the "setter of definitions" in a legal context.
You have no idea the inherent power of being the "setter of definitions" in a legal context.
The presence of legitimate common sense (an actual concordance of principles, life experience, understanding, and the existence of a fungible nominative signpost that will be reliably reproduced within error bars) is surprisingly difficult to hew and maintain. It morphs over time, and is exactly why these multi-national tech companies implementing things like this is so terrifyingly dangerous. If they implement the capability to do a thing, they are now the movers of the political Overton window by realizing the means. They are literally shaping the rhetorical landscape.
Example: Let's say the push for this intrusive client side scanning came from the U.K., and the U.K. marketplace alone accounted for enough business to make it too painful to NOT do (simplifying economic/business assumption for illustrative purposes, and just picking on the U.K for because they are $not_my_jurisdiction). In the U.S. (Third Party Doctrine aside), this feature would be something that would be a U.S. Constitutional violation (4th Amendment) if mandated by the legislature short of an Amendment, yet since it would be done out of expedience in the absence of someone telling them NOT to do it, they'd ship it by default on American phones anyway. The mere existence of the capability greatly increases the willingness of jurisdictions to use it. This means the most privacy eroding jurisdictions are creating a race to the bottom for infecting everyone else barring population Al refusal to say No unambiguously.
I don't know why this jurisdictional backdooring isn't more obvious to people than it is. Or maybe I'm just starting to grasp how politics actually works vs. working in theory, but this really does seem to be completely screwing up how process is supposed to go. This is nothing short of a private entity taking the practical reins of power, and the political edifice coming along behind and post-facto rationalizing what the actual trailblazers are doing.
To be frank, this terrifies me even more than Congress being in charge. Congress's process rounds out most things to some level of effectual benign nature. Tech companies though? If you even start asking the important questions about higher order effects, either out the window you go, or everyone looks at you like a nut.
This is not a good way to go.