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Comment by xadhominemx | Hacker News Reader

> All of the slippery slope arguments have already been possible for nearly a decade now with the cloud.

Not only has it been possible for a decade, it’s been happening for a decade. Every major social media company already scans for and reports child pornography to the feds. Facebook submits millions of reports per year.

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I really don’t understand how you can, with sound mind, compare a public facing ‘social media’ with my very personal and very private phone photos. These are two completely different things.

They are not scanning photos stored on your phone, their are scanning photos stored on iCloud

My iCloud is not accessible to all my friends, family, work associates, and the public. Facebook/Twitter/insta is. (Depending on your privacy settings)

Scanning publicly accessible material makes a lot of sense and is within the boundaries of section 230, tech companies are responsible for policing removing illegal or threatening material. For private or encrypted information, section 230 does not apply.

The purposes these services were designed for matters. iCloud is meant to be private, facebook would prefer everything you post is public as it’s built in to benefit their business model. Facebook should scan, iCloud shouldn’t. You are purposely obfuscating that detail.

Yes, exactly. This is honestly nothing new.

This is new for Apple's customers. And its new in that the device you bought and paid for is nosing through your files.

Apple is introducing a reverse 'Little Snitch' where instead of the app warning you what apps are doing on the network, the OS is scanning your photos. Introducing a 5th columnist into a device that you've bought and paid for is a huge philosophical jump from Apple's previous stances on privacy, where they'd gone as far as fighting the Feds about trying to break into terrorist's iPhones.

Luckily for their customers it can be turned off. So, what’s the issue?

A huge part of Apple’s value proposition is iCloud. If I have to turn that off to keep the spy out of my OS, it’s value to me is dramatically diminished.

Since you presumably don’t trust Apple to scan your photos, it sounds like Apple might not be for you, then. Who will you move to?

In the past I trusted Apple to resist government efforts to spy on me to the best the law allowed. Now they are innovating ways to help a government spy literally live in my pocket.

Trust is fragile and Apple has taken what in the past I believed it understood to be a strategic advantage and stomped it into little pieces.

Motte and Bailey much?

"Well you can turn it off" to "Well, but then you just don't trust Apple".

Clearly these are users who did trust Apple. Apple betrayed their trust. Given that Apple bulk handed over iCloud data to China, I don't really believe their pinky promise that they are, by policy only, going to resist government use of this tech. They can cave to government cases _and_ the government can certainly force them to.

The point is that turning it off resolves the issue, but if someone refuses to turn it off because they want to use iCloud there’s clearly a contradiction.

Therefore you must trust Apple. So if you still have issues then you don’t trust Apple.

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