Apple's backing down on that very sound initiative was a failure and a red flag indeed. They had the chance and the weight to pull it off and set a standard, but instead basically gave in for regulators to implement whatever spying laws they want.
Sadly, nothing else comes even close to Apple in terms of security and privacy, especially for someone who is not an infosec specialist and doesn't have time to read CVEs all day.
> Sadly, nothing else comes even close to Apple in terms of security and privacy, especially for someone who is not an infosec specialist and doesn't have time to read CVEs all day.
Even for someone that is not an infosec specialist, they should be using something like Graphene for phones and something like Qubes for their OS.
Apple isn't great at all honestly, at least in terms of MacOS security - they mostly benefit from not being worth the time to target.
While you make good points, I still wouldn't trust Apple to not scope creep over time. Client side scanning of hashes for csam presents the entry point they need to establish client side scanning as a norm. It's the preverbial inch. Give it a year, or months even, and watch that grow to include scanning of text for terroristic threats, or of teens' chats for grooming, or depression, etc. Then watch that data become a gold mine for both the gov and for advertisers.
The slope is so slippery that it's ot worth the risk, imo. It paves the way to reduce general computing even further, which is already quite restricted on apple devices to begin with.
Sadly, nothing else comes even close to Apple in terms of security and privacy, especially for someone who is not an infosec specialist and doesn't have time to read CVEs all day.