I found this very interesting. Would love to hear some smart peoples thoughts on his claim.
"Apple Has Begun Scanning Your Local Image Files Without Consent"

@briankrebs
@mmasnick
@timbray
@Edent

https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-now/

@kbarker @timbray @briankrebs @mmasnick @Edent It’s certainly curious what `mediaanalysisd` is doing over the network, but it should have nothing to do with CSAM fingerprint checking. Apple’s original proposal for that was to do the fingerprint checking locally, on device. And regardless, Craig Federighi told Joanna Stern of the WSJ last month they shelved that whole plan: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/12/07/stern-federighi-icloud-e2ee

@gruber

Yeah, I can't see any reason this would have anything to do with that CSAM kerfuffle.

But my computer's phoning home every time I click on one of my pictures on my local disk, and I don't think it's unreasonable to find that disturbing.

@kbarker @briankrebs @mmasnick @Edent

@timbray @kbarker @briankrebs @mmasnick @Edent I’m trying to find out what this daemon is doing and why the old-fashioned way. (I asked Apple; impossible to say if I’ll get an answer, but if I do, I’ll report.)

@gruber This is Live Text, Visual Look Up, and Image Cropping, all announced and demoed in WWDC 2021 or 2022 and shipped in Monterey and Ventura.

@Cdespinosa @gruber That would be more intrusive than the cancelled CSAM scanning. That used pre-defined hashes of known images and only ran on images in your cloud library. This can identify subjects in new images using AI, and text using OCR, on your local Mac.

Which is fine if processing is happening on-device.

If processing is happening in the cloud, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how governments, including US state governments, could use this to target people.