That's also opt-in, though it's opted in by the parent of the child you're communicating with.

If you're talking to adults, or children whose parents don't want to use the service, you're not getting your photos scanned.

The CASM scanning happens on device, right? At least so we’ve heard.

My sense is Apple is trying to keep CASM off their servers. Scanning phones before it gets there was their solution to what I assume is a government demand/ultimatum. “Do this or we repatriate your foreign entity taxes” or some other shit.

I too feel that Apple just caved and eroded trust that took decades to build up. The only way this gets sorted is the “screeching minority” continues to screech and brings other in. Notify state attorneys general, FTC, etc. will that do anything? Who know? My bet is that it’s the DOJ behind all of this.

Hopefully the plaintiff bar which are already preparing class action lawsuits will find a way to get documents in discovery that allude to government coercion. But then again I’m sure there would be a clever way those are not produced under some “national security” bullbaiting reason.

All we can do is try, and keep the pressure on.

It isn’t being circumvented. It is intended to work on photos that are uploaded to iCloud. If you don’t use that (via turning it off or via selling everything Apple and switching to Linux) then you aren’t using it.

The theory would be that many people are stupid. Of course we only know about criminals who get caught and that tends to be because they made a mistake, so it looks like most criminals are stupid.

They could have done what you describe at any time in history. This doesn't change anything in that regard. Either you trust Apple enough to use their products or you don't.

Probably, at least until someone successfully gets a court to say otherwise, by which time it'll be irrelevant because everyone will either have installed & enabled it to get the updates or (less likely given how entrenched many iDevice users have become) moved to other products.

And after the case to stop them refusing security updates for those without it installed+enabled, there will need to be another one to force them to allow it to be disabled, then a few circuits around the court of public tattle to make it really disable and not magically re-enable itself at random intervals.

Interestingly, iOS 15 is the first version of iOS in history to be optional if you want security updates. You will be able to choose if you want to go to iOS 15 and get the new features (including the CSAM prevention stuff), or you can stay on a security update only channel for iOS 14 (for a unknown period, but I'd guess until WWDC 2022? N-1 seems reasonable).

https://www.apple.com/ios/ios-15-preview/features/ (under settings)