For now, yes. But people are worried that that's just the first step to get the snooping service onto your phone. Because why stop here? Soon it maybe scanning photos not just destined for iCloud.

And why draw the line at photos? Videos, music, text files, anything could be interesting for governments, film studios and record companies. Why do you have an MP4 of the latest Spider-Man movie on your phone? Did you legally buy this Miles Davis album? Is this an image of a rainbow flag on your phone, my dear Russian citizen?

It's just a small step from here to constantly scanning all your local files on iOS, padOS and macOS because someone, somewhere might want to take a look at them.

That difference is a very significant one.

The scanning either happens on devices that the company owns, the cloud servers, or it happens on a device that the consumer owns, without the consumer being able to control it.

Sure, this particular move strictly improves privacy. But it has some terrible implications:

1. That there are circumstances in which it's okay to design an electronic device to work against its owner: an accusation is all it takes to ruin your life. Existing cloud services only scan their own computers, of course.

2. Because it provides more privacy than existing cloud services, people (esp. governments) might come to see this as an acceptable compromise between user privacy and law enforcement power.

The precedent is scanning on the user's device, yes. As far as I understand they are trying to limit the stream of subpoenas for users data by encrypting everything, without being called pedo enablers or something like that. But what they are doing is in effect showing the governments and anti-freedom activists that it is in fact possible to do this on users' devices, thus building a foundation for further expansion of such scanning to all data, sent or stored, on all apps, on the operating system level, and not only of their own initiative, but as a result of a legislation. And then why would you not fight other things that are currently considered to be societal ills? It's the next logical step. There are plenty of countries where you could get real prison sentences for writing or saying things, all with "well intentioned" justifications of course. We are steadily moving towards a "digital gulag", and Apple is paving the way. All of this also shows those who value freedom as pedo enablers, forcing other companies to also implement similar processes.