Honestly the trust damage is already done. They announced it, the genie is out of the bottle. I can never trust Apple as much as I did before. They are no longer the benevolent dictator of the walled garden. They have proven their judgement is fallible. They have proven that their customers interests do not matter to them as much as their own agenda. I'm not sure how they can ever fully recover from this, or even promote themselves as a privacy focused brand. That will always ring hollow.
This reminds me a bit of the DNS-over-HTTPS hand wringing as well. DoH points out that applications can run their own DNS and you can't easily control that behavior at a network level like with conventional DNS. That is pretty troubling from a technically literate user perspective but it's not actually new. Applications could always hard-code DNS. DNS-over-HTTPS just made us think about it.
Similarly Apple has complete control of your device. They always have, it's actually part of the value proposition. There has been a lot of debate about what Apple should or shouldn't do here but the fact is they could have pushed this out silently and it could be scanning your entire device right now, we just don't know. We have to trust Apple at their word and after their announcement that they would push this kind of capability I'm not sure how we can ever trust them again.
As many have been saying for decades, the only way to have privacy when computing is by using publicly auditable open source software. No amount of pinky promises made by the marketing department can change that.
It doesn't matter if the end user doesn't audit everything themselves, that's impossible to do in a reasonable manner, but the constant auditing and testing by many independent entities gives, in my opinion, a better assurance of privacy than some marketing material saying they deeply care about me.
Somehow a large subset of the general public doesn't seem to understand this. And act all surprised when Apple, Google, Microsoft or whatever screws them over.
You don't deserve this personally, and I'm genuinely interested if you have more insight, but I feel the need to vent:
Really? What the fuck did Apple do, that you gave them total control to dictate _your_ walled garden in the first place?
I just don't get it. My best guess is Sunk-cost-color glasses,. From the moment they launched itunes (which is 15y old for me) I understood their value was a walled garden as a platform. Users as a commodity. Valuation as overlords.
This reminds me a bit of the DNS-over-HTTPS hand wringing as well. DoH points out that applications can run their own DNS and you can't easily control that behavior at a network level like with conventional DNS. That is pretty troubling from a technically literate user perspective but it's not actually new. Applications could always hard-code DNS. DNS-over-HTTPS just made us think about it.
Similarly Apple has complete control of your device. They always have, it's actually part of the value proposition. There has been a lot of debate about what Apple should or shouldn't do here but the fact is they could have pushed this out silently and it could be scanning your entire device right now, we just don't know. We have to trust Apple at their word and after their announcement that they would push this kind of capability I'm not sure how we can ever trust them again.