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tommikele said:

Hollow victory. 

As soon as the uproar has died down and Apple thinks it is safe they will be back. They will frame what they put forth next time as "look what we have done to protect you." when in reality it will likely just be cosmetic.

I agree.  I have lost faith and I have been busy divesting out of the ecosystem for the last month.  Moving out of photos and imessage so far.  Will be giving up on icloud as my i replace the services backing into it.  And I am also looking into getting a personal email account and just give up on that from apple.  Perhaps it wasnt a good idea to put so much faith in one company for two decades.

I am shocked at this.  This is a slippery slope and I disagree with the article that this is a middle ground.  This is essentially a 2-step backdoor.  Back in 2011, India gave blackberry an ultimatum to hand over access to bbm or leave the country.  Blackberry countered for a month and then handed over the keys.

In apple's case they have been harassed by FBI and have always presented the defence that the design is built with complete privacy with no way to circumvent it.
Well now there are ways to circumvent this.  Even if you are using CSAM database, why cant at the behest of a foreign government you use another one to help them or get shut out of the country?  Apple is going to say no and leave china? or India? They absolutely wouldnt.  Same with fbi who might even be looking at CSAM itself at this point.

Also 1 in a trillion is not great odds.  I have 350k photos alone.  And think of other use cases, any government agency can trap you through an app placing photos that triggers an investigation.  A person can trap someone by planting photos on someones phone.

And then this goes into imessages, browser and search history, emails.  Why stop anywhere?  Why can't apple do realtime surveillance and alert authorities when a child is being abused.  Let algorithms call 911.  Or any other crime.  Dont you wanna save children?  Isnt that a goal above all goals at any price?

Why do we need search warrants to search houses?  If police suspects someone of a crime, why do they need any warrant, why cant they barge in?  After all they could potentially save children?  They wont be getting into every house right.  And why are you worried if you have nothing to hide?

Sad part is, people who abuse children, are likely going to leave the platform or find other ways.  While those who dont will be under surveillance of unprecedented historical nature in the history of human civilization.

Lets not forget, desipte all claims that apple makes - its apple devices that resulted in leaks of thousands of nudes of celebrities, it is apple that NSO's pegasus so efficiently targeted for governments to surveil thousands of politicians, journalists and social activists.  With a horrible track record, fanboys just keep drinking the kool-aid.

And now apple is going all in on creating backdoors on its users.

ArchStanton said:

Not a big fan of some of the wording in the letter but I understand the meaning behind the larger message. IMHO Apple made a mistake at minimum in how they rolled this out, at minimum. DAalseth comment was correct, this will be attempted to be used to bludgeon Apple. How well it succeeds is doubtful, IMHO.  But the surreal irony is some of those doing the bludgeoning will be among the worst purveyors of data privacy collecting and exploitation.
No problem with the signers of the letter expressing this very important point. But Here's my problem with the signers of this letter: where the hell have they been on  the vast majority of smartphone users on the planet using a platform that was tracking the hell out of them? They've just been given a big platform to condemn user privacy issue  based on Apple's MEC surveilling, so where the hell is page 2 to protect hundreds of millions of people getting their privacy data tracked constantly? Speak now or show yourself to be looking for a few headlines. 

EFF has been there since day 1. Calling out Facebook and Google but also calling out Apple when it was needed. Where were the rest of these letter signers? Unfortunately a few of them probably, I suspect, getting "third party research" grants. See how that works?

Well, to be fair, rest of them never promised and championed privacy like apple does.  And this is nothing but a two step backdoor.  I have no choice but to divest from everything i own from apple.  I need to now look for alternatives to my ipad pro, macbook pro, watch, iphone, imac.  I cant believe apple did this.

Come back or we will run lots of anti-apple ads.  Great strategy!

If true I wouldnt buy a flat design like that.  It would like entangle against other surfaces and clothes and even scratch anything it contacts.  I guess we will know once it comes out.