There is no way to scan people’s content while “respecting their privacy.” The goal should be to create a system where you couldn’t do so even of you wanted to (or the state demanded it).
There’s this bizarre notion that using end-to-end encryption can absolve you of responsibility, that the authorities will have to accept an answer of “we literally can’t access it”.
That’s just not the case for centralised things: you’re deliberately facilitating some service, government will find you liable for some things in its operation, and if you don’t comply, they’ll fine or shut you down. E2EE doesn’t absolve you from law; law is all about saying you’re not allowed to do things that are physically possible.
(Decentralised things, now they can be banned but not truly stopped because there’s no central party to shut down.)
A state that does not accept it might retaliate against the entity giving that answer or forbid future use of end-to-end encryption without backdoors, but the truth of the answer doesn't depend on anyone's acceptance.
This is what has happened in many countries already.
Legal terms such as "murder", "fraud" and "rape" do change as effect of regulatory changes. "Encryption" and "privacy" do not.
There's a limit to how much you can bend semantics in your PR before it breaks and you get backlash.
They're deliberately misrepresenting what's happening, appearing surprised when people misunderstand, and bundling together legitimate criticism with misunderstandings.
I can draw some parallels to how Google went out with FLoC.
Honestly I can't tell where Hanlon's razor should cut here.
Problem is that the law is self-contradictory and it is up to the judicative institutions to fix it as soon as possible.
You can still do secure backups of your phone without using iCloud, but there isn’t a way for Apple to do end to end encryption of backups transparently like you can with real time communication. The only way end to end encryption of backups works is to require people keep a separate secure key(s) to avoid losing their data, which means a universal implementation has real direct risk for users.
As long as Apple has access to these files the FBI can legally require them to do these searches. From a pure PR perspective they should have communicated what was already going on before releasing this system because people assume something significant changed.
There is no reason the password can't be the encryption key, with backup keys stored with a trusted third party (eg: your credit union or bank) without notation as to what these backup keys are tied to.
Trusting third parties with the password in unencrypted form is either systematic in which case the FBI now just needs collect data from 2 different organizations, or on a case by case basis in which case users will mess it up. Apple etc would have no way to verify users actually did something to back up their keys.
Apple’s current approach is to let users setup their own backups if they want security which allows for privacy just fine without providing a service with fundamental issues.