IMHO, the answer is that the police work should be done by the police and not by consumer products.
For some strange reason the “think of the children” argument is alive and well and can be used for all kind of privacy busting.
Seriously, why we don’t think of the domestic abuse victims and mandate all time listing microphones then?
Edit: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/senate-judiciary-commi...
Unlike Google, Apple didn’t have access to all photos in an unencrypted form to do whatever they pleased with them. If and only if 5 photo fingerprints matched a known csam photo, could Apple view a thumbnail of the photo.
How could that possibly be thought of as worse than Google’s “we can see all your data all the time” approach?
Inconsequential implementation details. Your device still acts as a snitch for whatever the authorities are looking for. Today looking for CSAM match tomorrow can be environmentalism, abortion, meat products etc - depending on how the politics evolve.
Fine to think that scanning for csam is wrong, but the fact that it’s based on fingerprints sent to the cloud doesn’t make their scheme worse than Google who has access to unencrypted photo data to do whatever they want with (as argued by many in this thread).
Since I believe that a lot of issues humanity has to deal with come from mental health issues (I like to make this point so I won’t belabor it), I also find “think of the children”, while often misused, on its actual substance not an argument to be ridiculed.
Today I am reminded about The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin a little.
And people start getting tired of this serious issue being used, not because the people who want these measures passed care, but because of whatever agenda those people are actually interested.
It is precisely because it is so severe, that it is difficult to say no to measures in favor of it. But that same fact, is abused by people with bad intentions.
However, we (as a crowd) have decided that those side-effects would be even worse than CSA itself. And perhaps we were right, but it should weigh on our consciences as we were the utilitarianist arbiters that decided individual suffering was not significant enough, and we should not rest as if we’ve “won” because a big problem (to solve which Apple seemed even willing to put its reputation on the line) remains unsolved.