This is the lasting legacy of Apple’s CSAM photo scanning debacle. Apple mainstreamed the concept, demoed the dystopian tool, and legitimized the discourse of this dystopian insanity.
Apple executives should be ashamed of their direct role in this.
Apple executives should be ashamed of their direct role in this.
Note that similar laws are being proposed in the UK, EU Australia and Canada (not sure of the latter two tbh).
Before that this sort of legislation was just straight asking for a skeleton key or a ban on e2e, many laws still do. Apple trying a thing and failing didn’t fundamentally change anything because these laws aren’t asking for a specific technology, they’re asking to be able to see all your messages no matter the method. That’s literally the politicians level of understanding “want read read messages”.
If Apple had never thought up the CSAM scanner concept they’d still be pushing to just break the encryption. Hell they may even stumble upon the “well just send us a copy or scan it for all these fingerprints before you encrypt it” concept themselves, it’s not really a tough concept.
That was an attempt to get out ahead of it and neuter the pressure for those laws. But there was so much opposition that Apple's strategy failed.
Dropbox scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Google scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Meta scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Microsoft scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Apple did not (and still does not) scan your images in the cloud for CSAM.
Notice anything different here? The privacy company wanted to do what everyone else was already doing in a privacy-preserving way. They made a press release about it, and everyone got mad. But the same people are just fine using Google and MSFT which actively scans their data for the same images?
I seriously do not understand your logic behind this.
I'm assuming the Brits just don't care as much about privacy.