My point was and is clear — if this is a big issue to the majority of users, why is there such a low number of petition signatures?
Believe what you want to believe, but the numbers don’t support this being a concern for the vast majority of users.
I will give you an example, because I have made my decisions and am willing to share my point of view about the numbers.
In January 2020 I have received a warning from a friend about horrible situation in Wuhan, he gave me collection of censored from all search engines clips. My reaction was skeptical at first, but I have started researching the issue. Not long after this I checked all the available information about Sars 1 and Mers from respective sources and peer reviewed publications.
For my big surprise World Health Organization reacted with "Don't stop international flights, there is no danger".
My reaction was immediately to check how Hong Kong had dealt with the situation towards Sars1.
I started warning my friends and colleagues only to be ignored and called "paranoid". Did I cared? No.
Why?
Because people want to believe in the best outcome, they are not prepared psychologically to see the world as it is.
I closed my office in March, changed workflows and moved to mandatory remote production.
The results are clear. Instead of taking government subsidies, my business is booming. My colleagues started thinking rationally and followed the prescribed and proven procedures of social distancing and high level of hygiene.
The situation with CSAM on device scanning is similar. There are informed people and uniformed people. There are technically educated people without system design skills and there are people who know what is this all about.
And finally there are a regular users who are so addicted to Apple as a virtue signalling outlet that they are ready to accept anything that comes from Cupertino as a holy gospel.
And mind you, a lot of people understand that petitions don't work, the real solution is to leave the apple ecosystem, not to update and take privacy in your own hands.
We were stupid and naive to believe that biggest corporation on earth will care about user privacy and now we are dealing with the results. Globally. Just as in the pandemic situation.
So good luck with the numbers. They represent a smaller fraction of a fraction of privacy conscious Apple users.
To quote Mr. Cook as a final remark:
Cook said that privacy is "
one of the top issues of the century" and that it's important to put "deep thinking" into that to figure out how to "leave something for the next-generation that is a lot better than the current situation." Cook said privacy "should be weighted" like climate change, another huge issue the world is facing.
On the topic of why people should care about their privacy, even
when there's nothing to hide,
Cook said that he tries to get people to think about living in a world of constant surveillance, something that Apple did this morning with the release of a document called "A Day in the Life of Your Data" that details how third-party companies track user data across websites and apps.