Child porn is an odd hill to die on. Of course pedophiles and purveyors of child porn need to be locked away; no one disagrees with that.
But to pull this out of seemingly nowhere, and inform all 300m iPhone users (plus however other millions use iCloud on Macs) that they must submit to a search, because we are all suddenly suspects... this is beyond the pale.
Like others, I have baby pictures and kid pictures. I'm thinking about a couple of pics my wife took of our 18-month old, in the bathtub with her equally young cousins. I am wondering whether these pictures might get flagged in some way. Apple claims that they are only looking for known pictures already in a particular database, but that is cold comfort. If somehow one of my pictures pops up because of an A.I. decision, and a human decides it qualifies as child porn, my life is ruined.
As a side note, I was planning to upgrade later this year from a Samsung to the latest iPhone. That plan is now on hold pending review.
In fact I'm suddenly much more interested in the Librem phone, purveyed by the author of the article. As I recall, it's about $2000 USD so I had really not considered it seriously in the past. Now I am considering it seriously. I hope a whole family of new Linux-based smartphones can jump into this market and take advantage of the situation.
It'll be interesting to see how things shake out. Will this move by Apple go down in history as a textbook example of shooting oneself in the foot? Or will the masses simply grunt, and accept the inevitable?