People keep repeating the refrain of Google/Facebook selling your data, but is there any evidence of a single case where this actually happened? They use your data, to let advertisers target specific subgroups of the population. The companies that you should be concerned about selling your data aren't the advertising companies, they're the financial companies that are literally selling your transaction data to those and other companies.

That article is talking about the on-device scanning which IIRC never actually rolled out. That's separate from the iCloud scanning which they still do.

They poisoned the well by showing they were willing to do it in the first place.

Instead of the baseline being they probably are privacy first, now it is "carefully inspect every announcement to see if they are backtracking yet again"

I don't really envy their position; if I built a business that sold hardware and software and found out that customers were using my product to distribute child porn, I would probably be willing to abandon lesser principals too.

I don't think they should knowingly allow it. On the other hand I don't think they should do anything about it proactively.

> Should Apple allow [child abuse material] to be hosted on its cloud servers since that's the pro-privacy stance?

No they should not.