Your device would scan your photo at the point of you uploading it to the cloud and then it could encrypt it before sending it to the cloud. That meant that Apple's cloud servers didn't need to be able to scan it to comply with US Govt "recommendations" for cloud providers.

Whereas right now all the other cloud providers just send the photo as-is and scan it on the cloud servers.

With Apple's approach, the cloud servers don't get to look at every single one of your photos like cloud vendors do today, scanning happens within the privacy of your own phone, and only known-kiddy-porn signatures are flagged.

Apple came up with a way to make things way more private, but the concept of your own device working "against" you if you happen to be a pedophile was too much of a leap.

Your device would've scanned your photos ONLY if you would've uploaded them to Apple's cloud service anyway.

And it wouldn't have notified Apple of "something evil", just specifically known and human-verified actual real child abuse photos. And not even that, it would have needed multiple matches of those very real and verified abuse photos before it flagged them so that a real human could see a "visual derivative" of the photos.

Only if those multiple matches of derivatives were deemed as actual, very real, child pornography the authorities would've been called.

But nope. Now they just scan ALL your data in the cloud when the authorities demand it. And that's somehow better according to the internet in a way I still can't understand.