Apple Built a Backdoor Into Your iPhone With Its New Image Scanning Tools
https://gizmodo.com/critics-say-apple-built-a-backdoor-into-your-iphone-wit-1847438624

The new features could start the path to a slippery slope where Edward
Snowden said "Apple is unilaterally rolling out mass surveillance to the
entire world with this. Make no mistake: if they can scan for this
today, they can scan for anything tomorrow. Apple just turned a trillion
dollars of devices into iNarcs - *without asking*."

Apple's new features which involve algorithmic scanning of users' devices
and messages - constitute a privacy violation which can be repurposed to
search for any type of private user data that exists on your own iPhone.

Apple opened the door to new forms of widespread surveillance.
Apple is building a potential back door to your encrypted communications.

It can scan all iMessage content to warn parents of what kids are saying.
Scientists say this technology presents a number of obvious privacy hazards.

In terms of the iMessage update, concerns are based around how encryption
works, the protection it is supposed to provide, and what the update does to
basically circumvent that protection. Encryption protects the contents of a
user's message by scrambling it into unreadable cryptographic signatures
before it is sent, essentially nullifying the point of intercepting the
message because it's unreadable. However, because of the way Apple's new
feature is set up, communications with child accounts will be scanned to
look for certain explicit material *BEFORE* a message is encrypted.

The Center for Democracy and Technology took aim at the iMessage update,
calling it an erosion of the privacy provided by Apple's end-to-end
encryption: "The mechanism that will enable Apple to scan images in
iMessages is not an alternative to a back door - it is a back door,"
the Center said."

"Client-side scanning on one 'end' of the communication breaks the
security of the transmission, and informing a third-party (the parent) about
the content of the communication undermines its privacy."