Why did they start this PR disaster in the first place? Who was/is supposed ro pay the bills for development, operation and storage of this service?
Because they really want to prevent child abuse? Because they want to offer technology to governments like China that can then look for anti-Chinese-government content?
> Because they really want to prevent child abuse?
It's pretty likely that the vast majority of people involved with anti-CSAM efforts are in it for precisely that reason. Apple is just an organization of people, after all. For every free speech absolutist that believes child porn is a necessary evil we must accept in order to preserve our freedom of expression, there are probably a thousand people who are comfortable with scanning hashes if it stands a good chance of catching the assholes making it and spreading it around.
I’m sure the CSAM detection disaster gives Apple some leeway/plausible deniability with the governments who would have liked them to scan for illegal data being uploaded to iCloud before encryption, since they can say “well we tried!”
Because they really want to prevent child abuse? Because they want to offer technology to governments like China that can then look for anti-Chinese-government content?