Comment by gizdan
4 years ago
I'm gonna go out on a limb here.
At the end of the day laws are relative so to say. The thought behind such a system is noble indeed, but as we've seen, anything any government gets their hands on, they will abuse it. Classic example being PRISM et al. In theory it's great to be able to catch the bad guys, but it was clearly abused. This is from countries that are meant to be free, forward thinking etc, not any authoritarian regimes.
People in this thread are asking what Saudi Arabia, China etc will do with such power that Apple is adding, you bet your ass that they'll use it for their own gain.
I want to believe in such systems for the good. I want child abusers caught. But a system that equally can be abused by the wrong people (and I guarantee you that will be western countries too) ain't it.
It's not even hypothetical, it's already known that Apple has to use servers operated by China for their operations there [1] so this capability will be fully within their hands now too to arbitrarily censor and report iPhone users for any material they want to disallow.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-data-china-censors-app...