Most of the HN responses are dumb, get the details wrong, and don’t take the trade offs seriously. That kind of thing causes me to dismiss them entirely.
There are legitimate arguments and risks which I’d concede, but they’re not what most people in the comments are talking about.
"People just don't understand!!" has never been a convincing argument.
The implementation specifically for detecting CSAM can be okay while using that for other purposes can not be okay.
The goal is to stop child sexual abuse, FB reports millions of cases a year with a similar hash matching model for messenger.
> ""People just don't understand!!" has never been a convincing argument."
That's not my argument - I just think most of the HN comments on this issue both miss the relevant details, and are wrong.
There are people who profit from CSAM and in turn this creates a market for abuse. Unless we create structures which disincentivizes these behaviors — right now there are none - they will continue to grow. What Apple is building will basically make any criminal who sells to someone sloppy enough to store in iCloud risk being traced as the origin of the CSAM. Back to the darkest web they go.
Anti CSAM is inevitable. You will find similar systems for all major providers eventually.