[imgr8ness]

This is a clear privacy violation.

Most people who use iPhones actually have a cloud account and have their photos stored there. So, that being the case, Apple has already been scanning peoples photos this whole time, its nothing new.

What is new though, is they want to move the scanning to your phone. Why and what does this mean?

Well scanning photos is computationally expensive and every day, more and more photos are added to Apples servers which means they have to spend increasingly more money on hardware to cope.

This change is simply because they know it will save them money by offloading the computations to your phone instead of doing the scanning on their servers.

So, scanning your photos for child porn is not new, the method of scanning is changing.

Is it a privacy issue? You could say it is, but its not a new issue. Put it this way, if you have an iphone, then privacy isn't really a priority for you.