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Comment by petersellers | Hacker News Reader

Only if you disable iCloud photos completely. So no, you cannot turn off the feature unless you stop using iCloud photos.

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Correct. I'm not sure how that's a distinction from "you can't turn it off" though. I believe they've been doing this scan server-side for quite some time already.

Here's the distinction: I used to be able to use iCloud photos without having my photos scanned, and now I can't. So I have to make a choice of either dropping iCloud photos completely or submit to having all of my photos scanned.

I don't think they have been doing server-side scanning until now, hence the publicity. Do you have any evidence that shows they've been doing this before?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7865979/Appl...

I wasn’t able to find the whole video though.

No time to watch, but. https://www.ces.tech/Videos/2020/Chief-Privacy-Officer-Round...

The article you linked makes a surprising claim, and it contradicts what the EFF said recently about this here - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-diff...

> Currently, although Apple holds the keys to view Photos stored in iCloud Photos, it does not scan these images

It also seems weird that the EFF wouldn't have complained about this before if Apple was known to be doing server-side scanning for some time now.

I also am not going to watch through an hour video, but I scanned the transcript and I didn't see anything that said that Apple currently (at that time) scanned content.

I can’t find any articles about eff complaining about gmail, onedrive, or discord doing similar scanning either. All of those services (and more) do similar scans.

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