I think what people are getting riled up about is not the technical ability, it’s the lack of restraint, the willingness to search through everyone’s personal stuff on their phones. This is like the cops sending a drug-sniffing dog into everyone’s home once a day, with the excuse that it is privacy-preserving because no human enters the premises, and that only truly bad people will get caught. There is a difference between scanning in the cloud and scanning on device. One is looking through your stuff after you’ve stored it in a storage unit, and the other is looking through your stuff while it is still in your home. Apple’s excuse is that you were going to move it anyway, but somehow that doesn’t actually excuse things.