Apple are proposing to do it on your phone. There is no possible way they are not going to do it to everything on your phone.

That's a big policy change, since they're circumventing their own E2EE using their super-admin powers to do it.

The barrier when uploading to unencrypted services is that you are at least aware you're granting access. This is invading the phone to do it anyway - that's quite different.

But more importantly: when flagged this is going to send the results to human reviewers. Which has not been elaborated on: there's no way human reviewers can screen things without being sent a copy of the image in question. Which means, a neural network system is going to randomly send your personal images to human reviewers - and it will, largely, be false positives.

Note that Apple are not discussing anything about the reliability of this system: have they run it against a sample set of normal images? How many did it flag? Because, if they give a number, it'll be pretty easy for people to realize that some % multiplied by the number of phones and average number of images per phone, and I'm willing to bet what you get is: the system will false positive at least (and probably more then 1) personal photo per iPhone user, and send it to human reviewers.

And that might get people's attention: certainly more then just, unfortunately, us techies.

EDIT:

And let's talk about these human reviewers: these are not random citizens seeing something and wondering if they should be concerned. The context these people are going to be given is possible child abuse image. This is not a neutral review process - at all.

The concern is I bought an iPhone based on the promise of privacy of my device. Now there is a monitoring tool on my phone looking at photos for child porn. I get a false positive and some rando from Apple is now looking at my personal photos. Why?

Normalisation of this invasive behaviour is not okay. Apple specifically argued they are not Google and do not invade your privacy.

Is it relevant that other companies were doing this already? No. Apple wasn't doing this, so people invested in using Apple as a digital platform for their digital lives instead of the companies you mentioned, suddenly we are stabbed in the back by them.

You make it seem like it is weird to care about sudden local government corruption just because there are other countries that already were corrupted.

The other consideration here is that Apple demands total control of your device with the promise of security and privacy in return. If they don't follow through on that then why should I surrender so many of my fundamental rights as a user to them?

It's done locally now. Hardly the same thing. And sounds extremely illegal to me