This is such an insidious movement. It has nothing to do with child safety. The ~35 people that showed up here are nothing more than useful idiots for surveillance lobbyists, if not planted there by the lobbyists themselves.

The entire "Apple won't protect children" narrative pivots around Apple's decision to back away from their earlier misguided plan to monitor iCloud accounts for CSAM and alert the authorities to offenders.

Privacy advocates correctly pointed out that if Apple can scan your iCloud account for CSAM on behalf of the government, Apple can scan your iCloud account for anything on behalf of the government. Given Apple's privacy-centered marketing, the entire plan was dead-in-the-water from a customer trust perspective.

But a small subset of mostly right-wing reactionaries have decided that this is another moral failure of big tech, and are demanding that Apple "stand up to pedophiles" by tearing down user privacy.

It's a complete non-issue, because people who deal in CSAM are generally never going to store their contraband on cloud services, and even if they are careless enough to do so, iCloud isn't really the service to use if you intend to distribute this material.

At the end of the day, people are demanding that their own right to privacy be torn down just so that we can expose a small subset of harmful people that were never meaningfully enabled or empowered by Apple in the commission of their crimes. And the loudest voices here are coming from a deep bias against "big tech", where they paradoxically demand that these companies be held accountable, not by restricting them, but by demanding that they exert authority against their user base...