Since there is only one alternative, I am going to assume that this is a rethorical question designed to invite a discussion about how the alternative is significantly worse in your point of view. Not an interesting debating technique, to be honest.

> Pretty much every other company with a mechanism to send photos to the cloud scans your pictures for CSAM right now and nobody cares. They've been doing it for many years.

There are alternatives available that don't do this, but again, your point appears to be written simply to elicit this specific reponse. Your "pretty much every other company" makes it clear that you are also aware that options exist.

> Nobody cares.

Your next paragraph indicates that, actually, a _lot_ of people cared.

> Apple invited community discussion before implementing it.

Not really. Apple made an announcement, and in the face of an absolute, unmitigated _shitstorm_ of criticism from pretty much _everyone_, they -after fighting an incredibly hard and expensive PR battle- grudgingly called a temporary truce and relented on some of the items they wanted to implement. To frame this as "Apple worked with the community and listened" is... fancy.

The point of that debacle, and this sub-thread, is that Apple is irrepairibly damaging their brand. In the "we will scan all your photos on your device to make sure the content is acceptable" story, they destroyed (literally forever, in the eyes of many people) their branding message that they were on _my_ side, when it comes to privacy and unwanted intrustion of all vendors, including Apple, into my device. That was literally the reason I switched from Android, and by retroactively changing that deal unilaterally on devices I already purchased, they instantly and irrepairably invalidated my only reasons for buying into their overpriced and closed walled garden.

In this new debacle with the EU and their -frankly- childish reponse they once again showed their disdain for their users.

Apple sucks.

Devolving a discussion into meta commentary about debating techniques is not an interesting debating technique either. There isn't only one other alternative to the Apple ecosystem, I was asking an actual question. It wasn't a rhetorical question. But even if it was, are you seriously saying that rhetorical questions are a point of criticism in persuasive writing? Seriously?

Then you want to take issue with "Nobody cares" as though it was intended to be literal rather than idiomatic. For the record I was being idiomatic. I hope this clarifies things.

As for your alternative interpretation of what went down in the great Apple CSAM scanning controversy, none of what you said strictly conflicts with what I said. The core facts aren't in dispute, but I accept that people interpreted motives differently. Do you seriously think Apple would have made a big song and dance about their proposal around CSAM scanning if the intent was to implement it regardless? (Apologies for the rhetorical question.) Obviously they wouldn't have. They would have just subtly changed the license terms and implemented it without telling anyone.

It's amazing how quickly people forget why Apple wanted to implement the initial fingerprinting stage on-device, rather than in the cloud as all their major competitors had already done. Disdain for users' privacy, really? Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point of doing it on device was, as I'm sure you remember, protecting privacy by having industry standard scanning while remaining compatible with end-to-end encryption.

I think the reason why people are angry at Apple in spite of their climbdown is because Apple did a lot of damage announcing it the way they did.

Far from "inviting a debate" on how or whether this can be done in a safe and privacy friendly way, they made an announcement explaining exactly what they were going to do and how it was going to work.

The message was received loud and clear by politicians who are up against critics disputing the technical feasibility of surveilling the entire population in a safe and privacy friendly way.

Apple has dealt a hammer blow to privacy advocates. The effects of Apple's announcement have been percolating through parliaments and law enforcement agencies all over the world ever since.

Add to that the effects of Apple's side-loading ban, which is hands complete control over what software people can and cannot install to authoritarian rulers across the planet, their decision to hand over Chinese iCloud operations (including encryption keys) to a state owned company, and their willingness to make questionable security claims in defense of their own business model.

The picture that emerges is not pretty.

At the same time, Apple provides privacy protections to hundereds of millions of people who would not otherwise have them - realistically speaking.

If mobile OS competition was between Google, Microsoft and Samsung, there would not be a setting to blanket disable all tracking requests. Markets often end up in an equilibrium where certain choices simply don't exist.

Regulating this space without doing more harm than good is very difficult. We're going to have to wait and see whether the EU has done a good job this time.

The olden days equivalent of the HN crowd (Slashdot? Kuro5hin?) hated Microsoft's behaviour but had to build on their platforms because there wasn't an alternative that would pay the bills. So Microsoft kept raking in profits and probably thought that everything was OK and there wasn't an issue.

But that ill-feeling meant that as soon as an alternative emerged (in this case Apple, powered by open-source, Unix, the web - and later smartphones with the iPhone and Android) there was an exodus and Microsoft's attempts to regain ground (IIS, Windows Phone) were widely ignored.

Apple is on the same ground now (and I say this as an Apple-lover). They are pulling in huge amounts of money through their behaviour but I have no doubt, as soon as an alternative appears (probably through some platform shift) they will come to regret it.

UPDATE: and it would be ironic if the Vision Pro was the thing that triggered the platform shift. If the Vision Pro works well as a Mac alternative (a proper productivity environment but with an infinite screen), once others implement the same idea effectively (and maybe not quite as well as Apple has) it could be the catalyst for developers (and hence apps) jumping ship.