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Comment by ls612 | Hacker News Reader

It will be very interesting to see the responses of WhatsApp and Apple if this moves forward. Do their commitments to E2EE mean anything or not. Will iMessage and WhatsApp leave the EU or not. That would be extremely telling as to the actual quality of the security guarantees they purport to provide.

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Wouldn't client side scanning prior to E2EE circumvent this issue? If WhatsApp or iMessage scan your messages on device it doesn't really matter if they are then encrypted during transmission.

The end-result is the same. There is no security if someone is snooping over your shoulder.

Apple is easy - they had already implemented this voluntarily until they got pushback, and decided against rolling it out.

They decisively said “this was a bad idea” and disavowed the effort.

Things change, especially when the Gov says they must. It’s already been a few years. Given the “Apple in China” precedent I wouldn’t be so optimistic.

Their argument was that ”with this you don’t need to ban encryption”, and they tried to prevent that regulation.

Look what we got…

I am sure that no single implementation is as sophisticated as Apple had.

My understanding is that Apple openly declares they have the same encryption standards in China, and that iCloud Advanced Data Protection was one of the things that started getting them on China’s “naughty list” again.

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