> considering the start of this a while ago was the fear that Apple would scan your entire photo library without consent, I feel like this is fair trade.
The first is that since they were going to implement a much more intrusive approach but halted due to incredible backlash from users and the tech community it’s OK that they now implement a much less intrusive approach.
> It makes sense that the quite literal public link, open to anyone, is also accessible to Apple.
The second is that a publicly accessible link is very much not the same as “open to anyone”, the link itself is the knowledge gate required to access the data.
Let’s say I use iCloud and need to share my tax documents with my accountant who doesn’t use iPhone/Mac. I turn on public link sharing temporarily with the knowledge that only people who have the link could access it, thereby still being secure so long as neither party is careless in their distribution of the link.
My expectation as a user is that only those with the exact link can view my tax documents. But as it stands, Apple is now using their privileged position as iCloud administrator to unencrypt my file and scan it simply because the link is stored in their database.
Publicly accessible != publicly distributed