EsquireCats

"Conditions in the plane's cabin prompted use of evacuation slides." - Alaskan Airlines spokesperson 

There is nothing to support the baseless speculation that is boldly presented as fact that occurs in these comments.

I'd take the commentators more seriously if they accurately described the feature. Whether due to ignorance or malice each portray the feature inaccurately to support their various doomsday argument. My opinion leans toward the latter, deliberately malicious description of the feature, because: 1. it supports elevating their profile and argument, 2. there are far more, actually pressing, legitimate threats which aren't being discussed at all, 3. it's devolved into a strawman pile-on: people are adding voices late into the argument.

I hear absolutely no meaningful discussion about how social media providers and other photo services: each who all currently perform a more-privacy invasive version of CSAM scanning, are a threat to democracy and the like. Social media is a richer government target as it's the platform used to spread the information. The other issue is other service providers, such as Google's services - which has a *significantly* larger user base seemingly get no attention on the CSAM topic. While Apple uses hashes from the intersection of two known CSAM databases, Google additionally uses AI to guess if a photo is CSAM - so Google's human reviewers are fine, but Apple's are not? The double standard by commentators is clear.

In short: I don't buy the counter-arguments: they're filled with flaws big enough to drive a truck through. The real scandal is that Apple *didn't* have this feature for so long.

"Backdoor" doesn't mean what these people think it means. (That's likely also why Craig wasn't able to address the question.)

Most of this stuff is just hysterics from technophobes - scanning for CP content is long out of the bag, it's in every major social media service and Apple would be the last large provider to enable such a technology on their Cloud photo service. Apple's implementation is arguably the best for preserving privacy, minimising false positives and addressing potential for abuse by having human intervention as part of the review process.

The only merit I can give is to the example of unfriendly relations between abusive parents and children, however it's such a teased out series of requirements, and the child can still prevent any notification being sent to the abusive parent - in the worst case scenario the child merely uses a different chat app.

Opening the app store or allowing multiple app stores do not solve competition problems.

The largest smartphone OS is available with numerous stores - many of which are included by default by device manufacturers. However Google's store is dominant on Android OS. Stores that offer alternative rules, rating-free applications, free or pirated software all exist - however the appetite for such stores is small.
The likes of Epic continually make the argument that there is a great desire for such options, but there isn't, this is evidenced by the low appeal of the Epic store on desktop OS's: where no such limitations exist.

Smart phones users would be worse off to have a litany of unconnected stores, rather than a single curated option - this is before considering the security, privacy and consumer-protection shortfalls such misalignment introduces.

Some people are working overtime in inventing laughable doomsday scenarios.