There is no such thing as a trustworthy third party and even trusting yourself is questionable at the best of times. We are constantly balancing a bunch of different considerations with regards to the way that we compute, purchase devices, and utilize services. Security and privacy are of course important, and Apple to date has had a fairly good (if shallow) track record in this regard, at least in the United States.

With that being said, what Apple is doing here is just a blatant violation of that 'trust' and certainly a compromise to their commitment to privacy. Under no circumstances is it justifiable to essentially enlist people's devices to police their owners, while using the electricity that you pay for, the internet service you pay for, and the device itself that you pay for to perform a function that is to absolutely no benefit to the user and in fact can only ever be harmful to them.

It doesn't matter that the net data exfiltrated by Apple ends up being the same as before (through scanning unencrypted files on their servers). The distinction is so obvious to me that I find it incredible that people are legitimately arguing that it's the same, or that it in some way this is actually helping preserve user privacy.

As mentioned in the article, this does absolutely nothing towards protecting children other than directing all but the biggest idiots towards platforms that can't be linked to them, which I'd imagine, they already are.