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Apple clearly said they scan the photos on your phone not in your cloud account. They say it is designed to work with iCloud photos and they are processed / scanned on your photo before they are uploaded to the cloud.

Not sure why they would need to do that. It does open up your phone for scanning and uses beyond what they initially layout.

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Yeah, I think this is what freaked everyone out, but it's pretty clear the intention of on-device scanning was that it would work even if they had client-side encryption of photos before upload .

The whole point of the protocol (as described in the Apple whitepaper) is to allow clients to attest to perceptual hash matches without the server having access to the plaintext.

So, the irony of all of this is that the Apple design is effectively more private than the status quo, but everyone freaks out about it.

I think the ostensible goal was privacy preservation for photos whose perceptual hashes don’t match (i.e. most photos), which would never need to be uploaded without end to end encryption. But I agree it puts them within striking distance of scanning fully offline photos, even if the initial implementation doesn’t.

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