Germany’s Manuel Höferlin, the digital policy spokesman of the Free Democratic Party, has called on Apple to halt its plans to scan photos uploaded to iCloud for Child sexual abuse material.

As iFun reports:

Höferlin, who as an IT entrepreneur and chairman of the Bundestag’s Digital Agenda Committee is technically firmly in the saddle, sees a great danger in Apple’s plans.

According to Höferlin, CSAM scanning, i.e. the local comparison of private photos with the digital fingerprints of a database of known abuse images, must be described as “the biggest breach of the confidentiality of communication that we have experienced since the invention of the Internet”.

The FDP says that it welcomes Apple’s attempt to tackle the problem of child exploitation, but is worried about the implementation:

Every scanned content destroys a piece of trust that users place in the fact that the content of their communication is not monitored unnoticed. The Internet without trusting communication is no longer a civilizational advance, but the greatest surveillance tool in history.

Höferlin invokes some of the arguments made against the practice by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has warned that Apple’s CSAM scanning has opened a backdoor to iOS that could be exploited by governments.

The letter calls on Tim Cook directly to halt plans to scan for CSAM content stating:

This not only saves your own company many foreseeable problems but also protects the Achilles verses of the modern information society! Please remain with those who defend the civilizational achievement of a free network!