We send letters and parcels all the time within the USA and they are not inspected either. People also do horrible things in cars too, we don't systematically 'inspect' the content of every single car that drives on it past a bridge toll or similar. It feels rather flimsy IMO potential lawsuits without specific laws making this a liability that this would be the reason, like SESTA / FOSTA did.
Once precedent shows that apple or anyone else will just never have that info because they deliver things in the equivalent of opaque letters, legal precedent of previous court cases will make these happen less and less, if at all.
If I were apple, I would rather not have the responsibility of inspecting people's contents if I was a medium of transport, because it prevents an entire duty of care aspect that would pop up. You prevent more lawsuits by being E2EE IMO.
You see this avoidance behavior within medicine with malpractice lawsuits, where doctors would rather patients not speculatively test so they don't create duty of care issues, and where they outsource some kinds of testing to other firms, so the 'duty of care / malpractice' aspect that pops up in case they missed something goes to the firm instead of them. There is a big 'avoid seeing things if you don't have to' energy in a lot of medicine, and it comes from malpractice anxiety.
So there are things forcing apple to go this way IMO, I don't think they would do this by default.
Once precedent shows that apple or anyone else will just never have that info because they deliver things in the equivalent of opaque letters, legal precedent of previous court cases will make these happen less and less, if at all.
If I were apple, I would rather not have the responsibility of inspecting people's contents if I was a medium of transport, because it prevents an entire duty of care aspect that would pop up. You prevent more lawsuits by being E2EE IMO.
You see this avoidance behavior within medicine with malpractice lawsuits, where doctors would rather patients not speculatively test so they don't create duty of care issues, and where they outsource some kinds of testing to other firms, so the 'duty of care / malpractice' aspect that pops up in case they missed something goes to the firm instead of them. There is a big 'avoid seeing things if you don't have to' energy in a lot of medicine, and it comes from malpractice anxiety.
So there are things forcing apple to go this way IMO, I don't think they would do this by default.