Another take would be that they took on-board the extensive public criticism, and changed their minds.
1) I agree by accident
2) They thankfully stopped nagging me
3) Or they buggy implemented it and even though I kept cancelling after few tries they assumed I agreed.
If they don’t, they end up having data from different licenses. If you have many of those, figuring out what you can and cannot do with data becomes a nightmare.
You could get questions such as “Can you make a backup in country C for user U? He’s under the 2019 terms, so in principle, yes, but alas, user V has shared content with U, and V still is under the 2017 terms. Also, U has been in the EU for the past weeks, so EU regulations apply, at least as far as we catered for them in the 2019 terms”
Not changing the terms isn’t an option, either, as they have to be changed to cater for changes in laws. If you operate in 100+ countries,
That's their problem to figure out. If they can't then they should terminate customers who don't agree and ship them their data.
Obviously they'll never do that since it would be a terrible look and they'd lose customers, because they want to have their cake and eat it, too.
I am not sympathetic to how hard it would be for a corporation to do something. "It's too hard" is not an excuse, not least of all if they're a multi-billion dollar corporation.
If, for example, your bank changes their terms, your electricity provider increases prices, landlords increase rent, etc. they will inform you and often silently enrol you in the new scheme. Cancelling the agreement always (and maybe not even that) is an option, but that is opt-out, not opt-in.
So, why would cloud providers be different?
In short, other countries outside the US _do_ hold other service providers to similar standards.
I'm not a businessman, but I believe Apple's main customers are not governments, so I suppose that it's not good business for Apple to ignore their users' preferences. Governments in most of Apple's marketplaces change every few years, after all.
They pulled documents about the scanning, but we don't actually know they pulled the scanning itself.
> when Apple switches to not having access the keys to decrypt iCloud photos and documents.
We don't know that they are/were going to do that either. It's just a popular 'fan theory.'
Or do something equally pointless, but just as signally.
I feel like so many of these unstoppable force meets immovable wall situations warp both functionality and discourse (on all sides) on said functionality.
This comes about because everything is getting so centralized. The government wants to be in everything, and Apple (stand in for all big tech) does too. This pits them against each other, with the consumer only acknowledged when there is vast consumer agreement and motivation.
Similar to App Store, Apple wants total control, then governments use Apple's control to cut of access to particular apps. Consumers that understand the severe loss of freedom this creates (for them and developers) both immediate and in lost innovation don't like it. But there isn't a huge consumer uproar on that one ... so freedom wilts.
Bundling these basic features (cloud backups, app stores) with operating systems is creating an unholy government/platform axis that wins every time consumers are unable to drum up the motivation to speak as coherent allies pushing back.
Sometimes, the right way to kill a project (politically) is to let it publicly fail. Killing a project before it fails requires much more of a fight. It could also mean that the very public failure of this project gave Apple leverage over whichever spooks were pushing for it in the first place.
I feel this is definitely true most of the time, but in this case the cost to their public image/perception among the tech crowd was so high it was a mistake.
Why is this obvious? Normally, when you have an objection to a company policy, you voice those objections in private to people within the company. This seems "obvious" to me, but to explain--(1) it's against company policy and often considered a fireable offense, (2) employees have an interest in presenting a united front, (3) those who want the project to fail publicly want it to happen without interference from inside the company.
There is a big difference between happy with it and not unhappy enough to quit publicly when part of your job is to spread koolaid and look happy.
If i were against something like this, but not powerful enough to squash it (especially if a gov had a hand in getting it pushed through), then i'd make sure to do a press tour and get it in every newspaper for all the wrong reasons, while making an all/nothing stance to torpedo the project.
I can think of no other reason beyond utter incompetence why they'd announce it how they did. Apple is known for being secretive, but why did they do a press interview and say "sure other 3-letter gov agencies may need to add to the illegal photos database in the future" unless you wanted to really make sure the project would fail? Why else announce it in the same press release as scanning messages for similar content? It seems like the rollout was designed to be as suspicious as possible tbh.
This should be re-written to say
> If [i were not influencial enough to sink it internally, so i] were trying to sink the project [through bad publicity]
Therefore, the answer to your question is "darn, it didn't work. that sucks but at least i tried".
Also...
> Never assume 4D chess when simple incompetence can do the job
In this context, its very likely that a government is somewhat behind it. We know the FBI and apple didn't get along. We know apple has been doing things quid-pro-quo for china to stay on their good side. So it seems like we're already sitting at a 4d chess board, but no one is sure who's playing.
If a government says you have to do X on the DL, and you don't want to because its bad, then a logical solution is to get general population + news media to say "X is bad! We really hope X doesn't happen." Because then its easy to show the government why you can't do X.
I don't feel like Apple cares at all about perception among the tech crowd. So many things they champion draw the ire of us.
This is my guess. I imagine it went something like this.
Congressman: "So tim, FBI talked to me and want some help. Please find a way to check all pictures on iphone"
Tim: "or no?"
C: "We'll make it worth your while"
T: "This goes against our marketing and history, it'll take a really big push. My team says we can manage X but we need to work with CSAM agency to handle optics.
C: "Great!"
T: "I was right, the public hates it and doesn't care about children, we're going back to our privacy stance in marketing because the backlash would out-due the political reward. We'll throw you under the bus if you push again on this. We totally want to help for real and not just because politics is a game and we have to play, but this cost is too high, even you can see this backlash and recognize we can't go threw with it. BTW thanks for giving us excuse to hire a few new expensive ML scientists from google or wherever. They got to write some nice papers."
C:"Gotcha. See you next week for gulf when we try again at something new? There is this israeli company i want you to meet"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-commi...
Some nebulous political references in opposition to encryption aren't the reason Apple did this in the first place. They had and continue to have plenty of choice in the matter.
Only when they knew they would win, as with Bernandino Shooter PR spectacle.
They didn’t stand up against iCloud CN being hosted by Chinese government, they didn’t stand up against unencrypted iCloud backups.
As a corporation, they have no intrinsic morals at all, and privacy is nothing but a marketing term to them.
They don't want to lose China and $$, and they couldn't use and profit from people's data if iCloud backups were encrypted.
Companies are not your friends.
As for the negativity. That is based on experience with large tech companies.
That's what I meant.
> Update: Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer told The Verge that though the CSAM detection feature is no longer mentioned on its website, plans for CSAM detection have not changed since September, which means CSAM detection is still coming in the future.
All the more reason to not give them the benefit of the doubt with shit like this. If they say something flat out, that has some weight since there could be legal repercussions for lying (in theory anyway.) But not saying anything and letting people infer whatever they want? That's how companies with PR and Legal teams like to cover their asses instead of outright lying. The company says nothing and lets their supporters invent whatever headcanon is most flattering. I don't go in for that.
Edit: The same thing happened when they let Apple fans infer that this feature was preparation for enabling proper E2EE. As far as I'm aware Apple never actually said that and their supporters decided to believe it without evidence, just a lot of wishful thinking.