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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

Pretty obviously the only reason to scan on-device is that you intend to expand on-device scanning to all files on the device, regardless of whether they are uploaded or not. ("We don't want child molesters to get away by turning off uploads," said Apple spokesperson.) Literally no reason to develop this otherwise. Scanning cloud images would be 100x easier.

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Apple has declared their criteria for evaluating the privacy of their CSAM scanning approach in their USENIX talk, and none of it relies on scanning all files. If you want to accuse them of lying, you will need to bring a lot more evidence since (i) presumably you believe they weren’t lying in the past and (ii) it would be an enormous liability if they were now.

There are many reasonable criteria under which the proposed model is superior for privacy. Perhaps the only reasonable criteria under which it is not is some kind of scope creep in what files are scanned. (Scope creep in what content is scanned for is a risk - an even greater one as there is no transparency over the hash list - of incumbent solutions as well.)

Either that, or Apple really doesn’t want their server to access (ie. decrypt) all photos by default. Maybe they actually weren’t lying when they defended being more private by having all computing happen on-device, and the server not accessing your data.

Now, what seems more likely to you? They suddenly decided to go towards scanning all offline files for no business nor legal benefit, or they tried to respect their own marketing of how their ecosystem should work?

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