Wait a sec - this wasn’t a ‘small press release’, it was a huge one, made several months in advance of the feature launching, accompanied by a bunch of interviews with execs.
If you look at the tone of all of it, they also honestly felt this was the most privacy preserving way to do CSAM scanning - likely so they can enable E2EE on everything iCloud.
What they got very very wrong was the public reaction to it.
> What they got very very wrong was the public reaction to it.
What they got very wrong is that this fundamentally changes the nature of iPhones -- they are no longer user agents; in fact, they're actively scanning user data on behalf of another party. That change doesn't just make people feel uncomfortable, it opens the door for untold myriads of abuses.
It's one thing if iCloud servers scan user data - those servers never were assumed to be user agents. It's entirely different when user-owned devices do this.
What they got very very wrong is the idea that spyware running on the user's device is the most privacy preserving way to scan for illegal content hosted on their servers.
Apple has not announced E2EE for files stored on iCloud. If that is their intent, they likely would have had a somewhat improved public response by announcing it at the same time as the on-device spyware.
If you look at the tone of all of it, they also honestly felt this was the most privacy preserving way to do CSAM scanning - likely so they can enable E2EE on everything iCloud.
What they got very very wrong was the public reaction to it.