Think you shared that picture of police brutality anonymously? Think again.
A government could already coerce Apple into handing over iCloud data.
The cryptography at play here, combined Private Set Intersection and Threshold Secret Sharing are clear steps to make it as hard as possible for any institution to body this for that reason.
Y'all are starting to make me more sympathetic to Apple. Their biggest misstep was making these announcements simultaneously without foreseeing how many people would (willingly or otherwise) conflate them.
The only phones where iMessage photo scanning happens are those for children under a certain age (maybe 13?) whose parents who have opted into child protection where the phone scans for nude photos and notifies the parents.
People are conflating these two _different_ but _related_ features and their goals and limits.
Also, dissidents can just turn off iCloud sync and no scanning will happen.