> Apple’s ill thought out on-device CSAM detection and thankfully, the removal of it from its plans after heavy pushback comes to mind.

Calling Apple's CSAM detection "ill thought out" seems to me to be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Remember when everyone was up in arms about W3C standardizing DRM? Yes, the world would be better without DRM. But the DRM exists and will continue to exist. Arguing for not standardizing DRM isn't arguing for DRM to not exist, it's arguing for it to not be standardized. The encrypted media extensions let me watch DRM-protected content on Linux instead of being locked out of it all because none of the proprietary DRM everyone's using works on anything but Windows/OSX. Linux and Firefox and a DRM blob so I can watch Netflix is better than being forced to use Windows 10 with all its telemetry, Microsoft proprietary DRM, and a browser from Google or Microsoft to watch things.

Yes. It would be better if the government stayed the hell away from my files. Apple not implementing their CSAM scanning didn't get rid of the underlying issue or argument. It just means that it's no longer the tech industry setting the standard for how this will work--it's going to be the government.

Apple's implementation[0] was about as privacy preserving as we can hope for. It only scanned media that was about to be uploaded to their cloud service. It did scanning on device and used crypto to ensure, mathematically, that they couldn't even access the _hash_ of matching images until such a point that enough images matched to cross a threshold. They had client devices feed in fake matches to obscure even the number of potential matches that occur before reaching the threshold. At any no point in any of this is it possible for them to retrieve even the hash of an image that does not match, even after you've passed the threshold.

Would it be better if none of this happened at all? Sure. Is this a _fuck_ of a lot better than what we're seeing Europol pushing for? Absolutely.

Apple cancelling their scanning was a short term win. This isn't a new problem, and this isn't one that's going away. We can throw all the technical solutions we want at it, but it's not a technical problem. ("Sorry, can't scan user's content it's all end-to-end encrypted!". "Don't care. You wrote the encryption. Work around it.". "It's impossible!". "Okay, enjoy your new regulation that all encryption has to have a backdoor HTH HAND.")

I'd rather lose the battle and win the war. Let's put the most privacy-preserving CSAM scanning we can in place and take that card out of play. Let the regulators come out and try and explain how "Well yeah, you're scanning every image for CSAM but, uh, it's not enough. We do really need to see _all_ the images people have on their phones!". We're not making an argument, we're drawing a hard line and standing in place. The Europols of the world are not going to stop pushing. Apple's big, but not "override the EU" big.

When push comes to shove, we will lose. The EU _will_ respond with regulations. Maybe not now, but it should be obvious the way the winds are shifting. I'd bet my left testicle their vision for this is much more onerous than what Apple was proposing.

But hey, at least we can tell our children (away from our phones or any other electronics, and probably standing somewhere deep in the woods) that we were proudly defiant to the end.

[0]: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...