Didn't iMusic or whatever upload users' personal high quality files to cloud, to stream them back in lower quality, and then deleted the originals from the users devices? I remember something like that making the news.

Imagine being a musician and Apple deletes your originals to stream your own music back to you in low quality.

Yes, it did something like that. If and only if the user signed up for, paid for, and enabled the iTunes Match service, the whole point of which is to replace your local files with cloud music. (I don’t find this desirable myself, but I can see how some people might have.)

Apple screwed up big time in the functionality and messaging around it and some people found their original files deleted when they weren’t expecting it. Big problem.

But it was hardly some plot to scan users’ hard drives for copyrighted content and delete it. On the contrary, iTunes Match would happily launder a whole library full of pirated low-quality MP3s into legal, high quality, DRM-free AAC files.

That was iTunes, but the story checks out.

For many years, anti-virus vendors were able to do that. Why haven't those vendors been already co-opted by governments (Kaspersky on the Russian side, Microsoft in the USA side) into scanning for illegal, copyrighted or secret material and reporting on it?

Even open source products like ClamAV rely on a opaque database of virus strings.

Kaspersky is blacklisted as a government security vendor for anything remotely resembling classified or sensitive material. Also, virus databases are open to having their definition databases perused by the user. You can actually dissect what is being scanned for. Apple's system is not, and goes through great pains to be as opaque as possible. Understandably so it may be, from a rational free agent point of view it is still a threat at scale.

Top of that, there are many other tools which can do all the same. People are thinking like this has been hard work to add right now, and now future exploiting comes easier. Hard part has been creation of system, which locks Apple out of your pictures. Scanning your system files and sending some metadata is literally few lines of code and could have been pushed on week anytime in the past.

HTTPS and E2EE were not common many years ago

This really has nothing to do with those protocols as scanning happens on-device when files are just lying around.

the comment i was replying to stated:

> Why haven't those vendors been already co-opted by governments (Kaspersky on the Russian side, Microsoft in the USA side) into scanning for illegal, copyrighted or secret material and reporting on it

My reply about the only-recent prevalence of E2EE and HTTPS was an implication that the governments mentioned didn't need to get those companies (such as anti-virus companies, etc) to scan for [insert scary material here] as they would have just been able to hoover it up on the wire (as was shown happens in the US by Snowden)

Thus the question of "Why haven't those vendors been already co-opted by governments" is answered IMO - it wasn't necessary.

Edit: to be fair - i now see what you mean - "never leaving the device and still getting scanned" vs "scanned in transit"

I guarantee you they won’t. My guarantee is at least as good as yours.

Your guarantee is worse, because Apple has shown themselves as pro-copyright and pro-scanning.

I doubt iOS devices contain enough pirated material on-disk, on average, to make that worth any part of the cost (money, reputational).

Most iOS device probably don't contain any child pornography either.