That’s starting to veer into unreasonable levels of conspiracy theory. There’s nothing to “cover up”, the feature has an off switch right in the Settings and a public document explaining how it works. It should not be on by default but that’s not a reason to immediately assume bad faith. Even the author of the article is concerned more about bugs than intentions.
> the feature has an off switch right in the Settings and a public document explaining how it works
Irrelevant.
This is Apple's proprietary software, running on Apple's computers, devices which use cryptography to prevent you from inspecting it or running software they don't control. Very few people have any idea how it actually works or what it actually does.
That there's some "public document" describing it is not evidence of anything.
> that’s not a reason to immediately assume bad faith
The mere existence of this setting is evidence of bad faith. The client side scanning nonsense proved controversial despite their use of children as political weapons. That they went ahead and did this despite the controversy removes any possible innocence. It tells you straight up that they cannot be trusted.
> Even the author of the article is concerned more about bugs than intentions.
That is not the point at all and you either didn’t try to understand one iota of it or are outright arguing in bad faith.
I am not claiming for one moment that enabling this by default is OK. In fact, I have explicitly said it is not.
What I am saying is that it is ignorant to call this a cover up, because a cover up requires subterfuge. This feature has a freaking settings toggle and public documentation. Calling it a cover up is the type of uneducated rhetoric that makes these issues being brushed off by those in power as “it’s just a bunch of loonies conspiracy theorists complaining”.
Got it, so if Windows Defender (that is enabled by default on all Windows PCs) pushes an update that scans all your files on all connected drives and uploads hashes to the mothership, enables this by default and proceeds to execute the scan and upload immediately after update, but also includes a setting that lets you turn it off when you find out about its existence from some 3rd party article, that is all perfectly fine? (since there is no subterfuge)
It is a coverup. Apple is overtly and completely aware of the optics surrounding photo scanning - they know that an opt-in scheme cannot work as they found out previously.
Since they cannot convince users to enable this feature in good-faith, they are resorting to subterfuge. We know that Apple is vehement about pushing client-side scanning on users that do not want it, I do not believe for a second that this was a mistake or unintended behavior. If this was a bug then it would have been hotfixed immediately to prevent the unintended behavior from reaching any more phones than it already had.
Exactly. It is absolutely bonkers that people are claiming that Apple is trying to cover up something for which they have a settings toggle and public documentation.
Yeah, we might quibble about what the default value of the toggle should be, but them adding settings for minor features like this is absolutely a good thing, and very much a sign that they're not trying to hide things.
If anything, the lesson Apple might take from this could be "adding the settings toggle was a bad idea, because nobody would have cared about this at all otherwise".
That’s starting to veer into unreasonable levels of conspiracy theory. There’s nothing to “cover up”, the feature has an off switch right in the Settings and a public document explaining how it works. It should not be on by default but that’s not a reason to immediately assume bad faith. Even the author of the article is concerned more about bugs than intentions.