Nah, this has been coming (and inevitable really) since Snowden prompted the tech companies to introduce e2e messaging.

Note that similar laws are being proposed in the UK, EU Australia and Canada (not sure of the latter two tbh).

The idea of pervasive spying has been around forever. The want, and why. Apple mainstreamed, normalized the discourse, and demoed the concept of pre-scanning in the face of E2E. Apple provided the answer for the how.

Apple tried to come up with a method to still do e2e and also scan for CSAM, a noble goal if grossly flawed. It blew up in their face so they did the right thing and canned it.

Before that this sort of legislation was just straight asking for a skeleton key or a ban on e2e, many laws still do. Apple trying a thing and failing didn’t fundamentally change anything because these laws aren’t asking for a specific technology, they’re asking to be able to see all your messages no matter the method. That’s literally the politicians level of understanding “want read read messages”.

If Apple had never thought up the CSAM scanner concept they’d still be pushing to just break the encryption. Hell they may even stumble upon the “well just send us a copy or scan it for all these fingerprints before you encrypt it” concept themselves, it’s not really a tough concept.

Apple didn’t mainstream anything, indeed they withdrew the plan after the discourse was overwhelmingly opposed to the idea.

HN commenters leave so much context out of the discussion. Google is already scanning photos for CSAM. Meta is already scanning photos for CSAM. Dropbox, OneDrive... EVERY storage provider is scanning your photos for CSAM. And yet confusingly you only complain about Apple.

It's amazing how many times this has to be repeated. Meta/Google/DropBox can scan to their hearts content on their own machines. They own their machines, they can do whatever they want with them. Apple normalized the notion of having your own hardware spy on you at the government's behest.

These laws were in the works for ages before Apple proposed its CSAM scanning tool.

That was an attempt to get out ahead of it and neuter the pressure for those laws. But there was so much opposition that Apple's strategy failed.

No, this has nothing to do with that.

Dropbox scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Google scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Meta scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Microsoft scans your images in the cloud for CSAM. Apple did not (and still does not) scan your images in the cloud for CSAM.

Notice anything different here? The privacy company wanted to do what everyone else was already doing in a privacy-preserving way. They made a press release about it, and everyone got mad. But the same people are just fine using Google and MSFT which actively scans their data for the same images?

I seriously do not understand your logic behind this.

This argument is over. The 'screeching minority' convinced Apple that the 'privacy-preserving' nonsense was nonsense. I don't know why you are so desperate to cling to such a bad idea that its main proponent, Apple, decided it was indeed bad. It's like trying to be holier than the pope.

Perverts will distribute this content on those or other platforms pre-encrypted and we all will be left with mass surveillance and state control. Cool. It is sad that so many people still don't understand that this surveillance won't solve anything and is just net negative for everyone. :( Soon West will become China-like totalitarian countries.

This has been a fight going back to the 90s at least when consumers first got their hands on high-grade encryption and the US government tried to backdoor it. It failed. And it has consistently failed whenever the alphabets try to bring it back up here.

I'm assuming the Brits just don't care as much about privacy.

The UK government has been trying this for years, long before the Apple CSAM thing.

I don't think so , Britain has had an aggressive surveillance system ever since it became possible to have one. Decades before the Apple CSAM debacle

How does it feel to be a screeching minority? /s

The UK was like this before Apple even existed in its current form.