This really is something Tim needs to address before he again stands on stage and give lip service to Privacy with a capital P. We also need hardball journalists to start asking Tim these tough questions instead of fawning over AirPods And we need employees to start demanding this internally
I think we are all throwing wrong questions at wrong entities. What we should ask is what the hell is going on and what is forcing everyone to implement backdoors in this organized manners.
"Apple's earnings for Greater China in Q2 2021 were up 87.5% from this time last year, to $17.7 billion. During its latest earnings call, Apple has announced dramatically increased revenues from Greater China for the three months ending March, 2021."
China has cracked down hard on domestic Internet companies over the past few weeks (deliberately crushing their tech stock market to rein in these companies and enforce governmental data surveillance/control). They're not going to leave Apple out.
Apple literally cannot lose that market. Its market cap would be halved. Saying they're going after child abuse in the US using a new algorithm is the perfect cover for gradual entry into enabling mass surveillance for China. No one can argue with the child abuse use case, but there will be plenty of consternation when this is used to scan for messages critical of Xi and the boys.