zdnet[.]com/article/apple-is-bringing-client-side-scanning-mainstream-and-the-genie-is-out-of-the-bottle/
Government agencies cannot [yet] perform the predictive surveillance depicted in the film "Minority Report", but there's little doubt they'd love the capability. Today, and for the last several years, they're pushing, hard, for a capability that's not so far off into the future -- the ability to decrypt most everything. In the US there were a couple of famous legal cases where the gov demanded Apple unlock and decrypt data stored on an iPhone -- Apple's defense included the key argument that the means to do so did not exist. So the gov went to an infamous Israeli cyber-arms dealer and bought what they needed, but that was only a stopgap move -- governments around the world are working on legislation to mandate the kind of access a built-in back door would provide.
Apple, perhaps trying to do a good thing, is incorporating scanning stored data [pictures in this case] into their OS, which would report back to Apple if illegal content was found. In this article the author argues that Apple's destroyed its earlier defense, that unlocking software did not exist, potentially opening the floodgates for future government demands, e.g. if they can monitor images, then they can monitor anything else. Instead of adding a backdoor so the government can scan whatever, the OS itself would do the scanning and report back on what it found. And if Apple can do it, the argument can be made: so can any other company.
I'd seen articles & such on privacy concerns regarding Apple's new system, but hadn't considered the implications of the scanning itself that the author talks about. Maybe he's overly concerned about something that'll never happen -- at this point I have no idea -- but it's a possibility that I think is worth thinking about.