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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Apple isn’t the government.

Why did Apple invest so much engineering effort, into something so complex, without being told to do so? This move doesn't benefit their brand, or the year of advertising they have done to differentiate themselves with Google and facebook as a privacy focused company.

> This move doesn't benefit their brand, or the year of advertising they have done to differentiate themselves with Google and facebook as a privacy focused company.

They probably don't want “safe haven for child porn” to be part of their brand distinction from other online firms.

Who is pushing this message though? I've never heard Apple accused of this.

They are acting on behalf of the government.

We don't have any direct evidence of this, or any way of proving this, but it is suspicious

AFAICT, they are not. But if you have evidence that this is government directed (reporting results tonthe government isn’t sufficient for the private party’s action to be “on behalf of” government for Constitutional purposes), please, present it.

The problem is that this is very hard to prove since government is a black box.

Take this example where Pelosi, one of the richest members of Congress has personal calls with Tim Cook where she also holds her most worth stock of 17%:

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-makin...

If they are acting on behalf of the government there is a massive secret conspiracy to illegally violate the constitutional rights of hundreds of millions of Americans.

It wouldn't be the first time... but it shouldn't be our first assumption.

Instead, in litigation caused by this scanning the companies of testified that they conduct the scanning out of their own free will with no coercion or incentive of the government, simply because they don't want their brand being connected to the distribution of child porn.

Implicitly, they'd rather be associated with unaccountable mass surveillance-- with products that violate human rights, and with a push of a button could be used to enable genocide.

They aren't stupid, so you have to assume that they think that the latter is less of a hit on their bottom line than the former. Lets prove them wrong.

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