BS. It's for control and censorship and data harvesting.
Meta alone spend $2 billion lobbying for age-restriction laws, which they tried to hide by pumping it through third parties. We don't know how much the other tech giants spent.
They didn't even write this themselves.
Or another analogy, back in the day, when nearly everyone was taking pictures with film cameras, the person doing the developing of your film would definitely call the cops on you if you had them develop child porn.
Also hash matching is so easily bypassed you can be sure they really want to add some "AI" detector as well
That's a weak argument because they can already do that today with google's play protect and apple's app notarization.
That doesn't make sense. It's a defeatist attitude that serves only to advantage the opponent.
Its also completely unacceptable for encrypted/private messages, according to some of the top experts on the subject, "Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning": https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450
Except for that pesky detail of hash collisions
Add in the age verification. To make that reliable will require ID. Which can then easily be extended to provide more information than just age.
Camel. Nose. Tent.
That's not how that works, last I checked. AIUI it's much more fuzzy. Has to be, being scum doesn't automatically make you an idiot, and a single bit change would make plain old hashes entirely useless.
Insert your favourite dystopia to see where that ends up and how companies benefit from it.