> If for every one billion people(hypothetically of course) that are caught with child abuse images, one innocent person is asked to unlock their phone to prove that it's a false positive to a court, I think that's a fine trade off to make.
How do you know the false positive rate yet? Not only has Apple not implemented it yet, but people have shown that
a. NeuralHash can correlate two completely unrelated, undoctored images
b. Hash collisions are be manually designed with minimal effort and changes to the source image
You're pulling this hypothetical figure out of thin air, it may as well be one in a hundred or one in a trillion.
> I don't think you're correctly weighing the suffering to children this could help stop.
That's not the problem here. If people want to continue to store photos of child exploitation on their iPhone, they can do it with the flip of a switch. Once you disable iCloud, Apple stops client-side scanning altogether. That arguement is a whole lot of bark with no bite, and unless Apple did the unthinkable (eg. store hashes for every photo you ever took regardless of it's status on iCloud), it's never going to hold water.
> If the government wants to create a population-wide dragnet there are a lot of other ways to also do that.
Oh, like they already[0] do[1]? iMessage has been wiretapped since 2013, it's an open secret at this point that Apple is deep in bed with domestic intelligence agencies. Denying this is just refusing to acknowledge a truth that has reared it's ugly head again and again and again.
> If for example an iPhone was a literal perfect privacy machine it would simply be forbidden from being sold in totalitarian countries that wanted that type of dragnet.
Countries like China, who demanded that Apple give them complete control over their domestic data[2], a request that Apple happily complied with? If they give foreign markets complete control over iPhone data in their respective countries, imagine for a moment how trustworthy their behavior is in the United States, the same country that decides if they're a monopoly or not and sets their tax rates.
> the thing that protects me is not the technology, it's that I live in a democratic country that has laws to stop such thing as being prosecuted for just attending a protest
If you think that's what they care about then you're missing the point entirely too. People aren't paranoid that they're going to be thrown in jail for legal action, that's frankly silly. What the United States wants is two things: your trust and your data. They could care less if you're cooking drugs on your property, selling weapons illegally or, in many cases, exploiting children. If they actually cared about those things, they'd divert some of the national budget to addressing those issues. Instead, they take that money and invest it in surveillance. Billions of dollars get poured into black budgets every year, with margins that constantly expand. The NSA regularly backdoors encryption standards, the FBI regularly designs exploits and incorporates them into US infrastructure. If any of our surveillance programs want to backdoor an iPhone or introduce vulnerabilities into iPhones, Apple has no recourse.
> The police can listen to my phone calls and read my mail _right now_ but what keeps that kind of thing from being used against me in an unfair way are the courts.
What keeps them from doing that is that it's a pointless, fruitless endeavor to try and criminalize their entire nation. It wouldn't be hard to arrest the majority of US Citizens, it would just be expensive and time-consuming. A much more appealing effort is to keep tabs on everything you do, everywhere you go and everyone you talk to. That way, if you become a legitimate threat to the state they can zero you before you cause any real damage. Make no mistake, every government is only out to save their own skin. You may disagree with it, or find it silly, but that's realpolitik for you.
> Fundamentally I don't think any technological solution can save any of us if we live under a totalitarian government.
Finally, your first reasonable argument (and it's a concession to the point the other commenter was making in the first place). There is no way that we're living in a world where our government lacks the competence or resources to effectively monitor us at every corner. The reason why this concerns people is that it allows governments to collect data on what kinds of photos their population has saved/synced with the cloud. Apple is given a black-box list of irreversible image signatures that the government themselves consider harmful, and there is literally zero transparency that goes into this process. We have quite literally no idea how any of this works, and have no way to verify that it isn't being abused. Your trust in Apple and the US Government has to be unreasonably high to confidently say that this won't be abused in some way.
[0] https://reason.com/2021/12/07/secret-documents-show-which-me...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/04/apple-holds-the-mast...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...