Of course they did, this was always what was going to happen. You give an inch and they take a mile. First photo store (only if its going to icloud!), then messages, then the whole device data store. As far as content always starts with CSAM, then gets into politics. Then gets into protecting intellectual property.
We must fight fight fight to keep our message contents out of the hands of these tyrants!
This is progress from the UK governments previous position that all encryption needed to have a backdoor set of keys so they could check in every now and then.
I don't think they changed their position -- this is still the objective. Now that the forever wars are ending, its easier to push the child protection argument to achieve your panopticon goals.
They're unfortunately not the only ones who've in recent years have expanded on these types of behavior. Australia has been doing similar things too. COVID was a huge help in furthering totalitarianism ideals all across the globe, with many countries pushing to see how much they could get away with, in spying their own people, agglomerating power for themselves to stay in power longer, silencing the opposition, the press and the people, utilizing social media to gather data on their own people...
It is not a slippery slope.
It is a hard fall from the highest mountain top.
It escalated from "Do you trust and love Apple?" to
"Do you trust and love your Government?".
I am located in place where the Government question have a very clear answer.
So glad that Apple showed this before pushing "the new stuff", someone in the Glass Doughnut firmly believed that this will bring more sells, because of "saving the children".
Thank you, whoever you are.
Without knowing, you did the right thing.
Now we can ignore Apple's shiny toys and actually save money.
And if Governments want to scan and monitor us, please provide your own hardware.
I will not pay the bill for your dystopian nightmare.
They want to scan encrypted citizen communication and they aren't the only government with that ambition. It is just the logical continuation of idiocy of security policies of the last decades. It is firmly programmed into their behavior by now.
pandora's box has been opened. now its too late. im honestly afraid we are paving the way for eternal dictatorships whose downfall could be only provoked by cataclysmic events.
We must fight fight fight to keep our message contents out of the hands of these tyrants!