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Comment by unityByFreedom | Hacker News Reader

Good. I would be furious if I worked there. After the San Bernardino case, I viewed them as the paragon of privacy and security, to the extent I ignored most criticisms, including their lack of support for right-to-repair and concerns over App Store rejections. All of that is back on the table for me after this decision.

It is out-of-step with everything they've been doing up to this point, and it makes me wonder who has something over the head of Apple that we aren't hearing about. The stated benefits of this tech are far outweighed by the potential for harm, in my view.

If Apple pushes forward on this, I want to hear a lot more from them, and I want it to be a continuing conversation that they bear until we all understand what's going on.

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What's fishy to me is the fact that they are letting this be known. Like, if you're trying to capture people who share CSAM or have it on their phone, why would you go around saying that you can now scan for it?

I think this announcement would have been well known to cause a major outrage so why say anything? I'm wondering if this is a cover up for something else. Get people talking about this in the news and getting outraged about it while something else goes unnoticed.

Announcing it isn't fishy. If they didn't announce it, they'd risk a whistleblower telling the story for them. In fact, the story did break a day before Apple could officially announce it. That may already have hurt them more because they weren't even part of the discussion at that point. What you want is to tell the story on your terms. If someone beats you to it you can't do that.

Unrelated to Apple, but that's one of the big problems with misinformation. You can't get ahead of it because it's all made up.

Also, I think it would have been a matter of time before some researcher analyzing network traffic would have discovered something.

> I'm wondering if this is a cover up for something else. Get people talking about this in the news and getting outraged about it while something else goes unnoticed.

that's my thought, too.

Apple turned over all of the San Bernardino iPhone data, as iCloud Backup information is not e2e encrypted and is readable in full by Apple without ever touching or decrypting the phone.

The Apple vs FBI narrative was a coordinated marketing move (coordinated between the FBI and Apple) to push that "paragon of privacy and security" brand message. It's false.

Apple explicitly preserves a non-e2e backdoor in their cryptography for the FBI:

https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1ZK1CT

It's not out of step at all. Apple actively cooperates with the FBI, both operationally and in product planning/design phases.

They didn't unlock that phone for the FBI. The FBI got some foreign contractor to do it. Yes, Apple did turn over data to which they had access. Their stance back then was not a farce.

They didn't need to, all of the phone's data was in a non-e2e iCloud Backup, which they did unlock for the FBI.

Hence, farce.

That's called a conspiracy theory.

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