Comment by klipklop
4 years ago
Well for one scanning on-device lets them expand the amount of stuff they search for without an impact on their servers.
We can all assume they will eventually start scanning for more things than just photos only before they are sent to iCloud. It can easily and _silently_ be expanded to be any file on the phone.
You can do silently every imaginable thing right now. iOS is not exactly open-source system.
Except that right now thy don't have a plausible reason to be scanning things, and any indication of something like that happening without prior expectation would be an even bigger deal than this is. Setting the expectation that this is acceptable is how you hide overstepping and abuse.
Just because my neighbor physically can run out and physically attack me every time he sees me exit my house isn't a valid defense of him running out and verbally abusing and threatening me every time I leave, not is it a valid excuse not to worry about it escalating to that.
We were talking about silent things here. So there is no prior expectation for them? Silently expanding scan for every file for example would count still overstepping similar way for the most of the people. Because that is abuse, and usually there is zero tolerance. Apple has avoided marks of the abuse in the past pretty well.
But anyway, Photos spotlight, Files app or Siri are already scanning you files and getting metadata. Metadata is even stored to iCloud to be able to keep sync process working. There are excuses if you want to make them.
> Except that right now thy don't have a plausible reason to be scanning things, and any indication of something like that happening without prior expectation would be an even bigger deal than this is. Setting the expectation that this is acceptable is how you hide overstepping and abuse.
How do we know Apple isn't doing this right now? How do we know if and when they do? Are people keeping track of everything the phone sends back to Apple's servers? Is it even possible any more?
Considering Apple doesn't let you have full access to the device, the phone could do anything, encrypt the message and send it. The only way I know would be by monitoring the traffic off-device on the network all the time, which means only while on Wifi. And that wouldn't give you content, only metadata, as by then it's encrypted and you don't have the key.