Not only profits, but control. Remember the whole CSAM scanning debacle from Apple?
And then the whole world suddenly went apeshit, so Apple basically shrugged, said “fine, we’ll do it just like everyone else and put your photos in the relatively unprotected server domain to do the scan”. Sucks to be you.
Understand that at no point was there an option to not do the scan on upload, like all cloud providers, Apple scans for CSAM on any uploaded photos to stay out of any government grey areas.
Apple only ever scanned images being uploaded to the server. They were only ever going to scan images (even if it was done on the local device) if they were uploaded to the server.
On the one hand you have:
- do the scan in private, get a pass (I'm assuming we all get a pass), and no-one outside of your phone ever even looks at your images.
On the other hand, you:
- do the scan on upload. Some random bloke in support gets tasked with looking at 1 in every 10,000 images (or whatever) to make sure the algorithm is working, and your photo of little Bobby doing somersaults in the back garden is now being studied by Jim.
If you never uploaded it, it was never scanned, in either case.
So yes, you've lost privacy because faux outrage on the internet raised enough eyebrows. Way to go.