"Apple is being thoughtful about doing this in a (theoretically) privacy-preserving way, but I don’t think the company is living up to its ideals here," observed software developer Michael Tsai in an analysis shared Wednesday. "Not only is it not opt-in, but you can’t effectively opt out if it starts uploading metadata about your photos before you even use the search feature. It does this even if you’ve already opted out of uploading your photos to iCloud."
Tsai argues Apple's approach is even less private than its abandoned CSAM scanning plan "because it applies to non-iCloud photos and uploads information about all photos, not just ones with suspicious neural hashes."
Pretty bullshit this applies to all photos not just the ones upload to iCloud. I don't fuck with
I will definitely never argue against self-hosting things, it's often a great tool. But the particular reasons you cite here don't seem to cohere into much:
Apple flagging photos
This is a thing that they never actually did. They published a whitepaper about how a CSAM-detection system could work in order to gather feedback, the feedback was negative, so they didn't do it.
iCloud hack
Some celebrities had their passwords guessed. That doesn't seem to have much to do with the hosting provider, and is even less significant these days given the increased commonness of 2FA.
FBI access.
Any company is going to comply with the law. (And that's very much better than the alternative; while some places will have some shitty laws, having corporations be above the law is definitely not an improvement.)
But apple is the only large company that has invested significant resources into making things E2EE, so that they usually won't have access to any of your data to turn over.
Given that your examples are 3-11 years old, and in one case so old that the link doesn't work anymore, this feels less like a relevant response to this story and more like a grudge list that you carry around and paste into a comment any time apple is mentioned.
5
u/clrksml 7d ago
Pretty bullshit this applies to all photos not just the ones upload to iCloud. I don't fuck with
Reasons to self host
Apple flagging photos
iCloud hack
FBI access.