Apple’s new abuse prevention system: an antritust/competition point of view
There is no such thing as a trustworthy third party and even trusting yourself is questionable at the best of times. We are constantly balancing a bunch of different considerations with regards to the way that we compute, purchase devices, and utilize services. Security and privacy are of course important, and Apple to date has had a fairly good (if shallow) track record in this regard, at least in the United States.<p>With that being said, what Apple is doing here is just a blatant violation of that &#x27;trust&#x27; and certainly a compromise to their commitment to privacy. Under no circumstances is it justifiable to essentially enlist people&#x27;s devices to police their owners, while using the electricity that you pay for, the internet service you pay for, and the device itself that you pay for to perform a function that is to absolutely no benefit to the user and in fact can only ever be harmful to them.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter that the net data exfiltrated by Apple ends up being the same as before (through scanning unencrypted files on their servers). The distinction is so obvious to me that I find it incredible that people are legitimately arguing that it&#x27;s the same, or that it in some way this is actually helping preserve user privacy.<p>As mentioned in the article, this does absolutely nothing towards protecting children other than directing all but the biggest idiots towards platforms that can&#x27;t be linked to them, which I&#x27;d imagine, they already are.