> Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument?

So far any defense of this whole fiasco can be boiled down to what you are trying to imply in part. When you say "The possibility of abusing this system is a slippery slope argument", as if identifying a (possible) slippery slope element in an argument would somehow automatically make it invalid?

The other way around if all that can be said in defense is that the dangers are part of slippery slope thinking, then you are effectively saying that the only defense is "trust them, let's wait and see, they might not do something bad with it" or "it sure doesn't affect me" (sounds pretty similar to "I've got nothing to hide"). This might work for other areas, not so much when it comes to backdooring your device/backups for arbitrary database checks.

And since "oh the children" or "but the terrorists" has become the vanilla excuse for many many things I'm unsure why we are supposed to believe in a truly noble intent down the road here. "No no this time it's REALLY about the kids, the people at work here mean it" just doesn't cut it anymore. So no, I'm not convinced the people at Apple working on this actually do it because they care.

When "but the children" becomes a favourite excuse to push whatever, the problem are very much the people abusing this very excuse to this level, not the ones becoming wary of it.

> some of the tech community has begun to think we should do absolutely nothing about this problem

I don't believe that people think that, I believe that people rather think that the ones in power simply aren't actually mainly interested in this problem. The trust is (rightfully) heavily damaged.

>> You didn't mention any tangible results here. How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument?

That's a weird goal-post.

>> Why does the causality matter? A correlation is enough that cracking down on this content will result in less abusers on the streets.

Obviously of the people who look at cp, a higher percentage of those will be actual child abusers. The question for everybody is -- does giving those people a fantasy outlet increase or actually reduce the number of kids who get assaulted. At the end of the day that's what matters.

>> I wasn't the one citing that, but you are also citing an incomplete number since it excludes younger children.

[EDIT: Mistake] Well you didn't cite anything at all, and were off by a shockingly large number. Please cite something or explain why you made up a number.

>Well you didn't cite anything at all, and were off by a shockingly large number.

Sorry, I am just baffled by your last point here. How can I be off by a shockingly large number when I didn't even cite a number?

My B, I see now that was in a section where you were quoting hackerfactor. I guess I should direct that question to him.

> How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument?

“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably. The first time any man's freedom is trodden on we're all damaged...."

This is melodramatic high school Hamlet-ism. It’s also silly - there has obviously been a case where the first speech was censured. It happened before civilizations. Are we all still damaged and bondaged by that?

Look, speech is important. So is protecting the public good. But if one believes in absolutes, rather than takeoffs, they are IMO getting too high on their own supply.

Let’s talk about the trade offs that we have already made.

Does the fact that the NSA can comb your personal files and look at people's nude photographs not concern you? That's a present day reality brought to light by Snowden. Showing a colleague a 'good find' was considered a perk of the job.

We're lying to ourselves if we think this couldn't be abused and can implicitly be trusted. We should generally be sceptical of closed source at the best of times, let alone when it's inherently designed to report on us.

To your point of 'as a layman end user what is the cost to me?': more code running on your computer doing potentially anything which you have no way to audit -> compromising the security of whatever is on your computer, and an uptick in cpu/disk/network utilisation (although it remains to be seen if it's anything other than negligible).

My defeated mentality is partly - 'well they're already spying on us anyway'...

> This is melodramatic high school Hamlet-ism. It’s also silly - there has obviously been a case where the first speech was censured. It happened before civilizations. Are we all still damaged and bondaged by that?

Frankly, yes.

That seems like a ‘no’ then.