Apple already shipped attestation on the web, and we barely noticed

Probably not the RDF but rather that Google is famously bottoms-up driven, they're asking for feedback in an open forum, and the proposal is by individuals who are responding as individuals. One of them even posted to Hacker News. That unfortunately incentivizes bullying behavior by people who don't like it and hope that if they're nasty enough, the individuals in question will give up.

Apple has no time for any of that. They consider, they plan, they act. You never learn the identities of anyone involved, they don't generally ask for feedback, they often don't even give the justifications for their plans, and squishy tech sentimentalities are considered irrelevant compared to consumer UX. Getting mad at what Apple does on some web forum is no more useful than getting mad at a brick wall.

There are reasons why the "faceless corporation" is a cliché, after all. It's a deliberate policy designed to protect employees.

It does in these cases protect employees, but that's not the design. It's designed to avoid accountability. If a company decides to illegally dump pollution into the ocean or bribe a foreign regime, they by no means want the executives who made those decisions to be easily identifiable. Companies don't go to jail.

Can you tell us why you think people were bullied, and why apple's primary concern is consumer UX and nothing else?

I don't think they mean Apple's primary concern is their consumer UX, but that their customers' primary concern is consumer UX.

Just read this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36854114

A few choice comments:

"I recommend finding everyone responsible for this and exercising your right to free speech on them. It works for politicians, and it should work on this other flavour of bastard too."

"I believe both of these users are acting in very-bad-faith, and not correctly observing any ethical codes of conduct in Engineering."

"As far as I am concerned the reputation of this Ben Wiser guy is so far down the toilet that there’s practically nothing he can do or say to recover it. Like the old joke goes “you screw a goat once…”"

"The people involved in this concept/idea/proposal should be shamed into retirement. They should never work in the tech sector again. They should be afraid to use their names before first knowing their audience (an agricultural audience would likely be OK)."

"sometimes I don't think constructive replies are appropriate or possible. "

"Magnitude of the malfeasance is so great they deserve to be held to account for it"

And lots more.

I'm pretty sure beyond the personalization of the issue, 90% of the difference here can be explained by ad blockers. There's no deep technical or philosophical principle at work in most of those comments but what's clearly shining through is that tech people block ads a lot, feel they have a right to do so and will get furious at any attempt to stop them. Apple doesn't care about click fraud, ad blocking or spam on the web because those are other people's problems so they limit their remote attestation to the CAPTCHA reduction use case. This use case has the advantage that it improves the browsing experience for Apple users only. HN posters dislike CAPTCHAs as much as the next guy, so nobody cares. But Google want there to be lots of web content that's free to access so also concerns itself with the publisher side of the web, not just the consumer side. They list more use cases and ask for feedback, there are more consumers than creators, so surprise surprise, they get a lot of hate.

They do if other large shareholder executives need a scapegoat. Shareholders will look the other way and protect their profits so if employees are doing something bad but profitable, they are protecting the employee in times of outrage IMO

This is not true. Remember iCloud scanning for CSAM? Even though Apple was simply creating a process to do what everyone else (GDrive, OneDrive) was already doing, only with MORE privacy protections, they scrapped the entire thing after significant backlash.

Consumer voice is powerful. It shouldn't be underestimated.

Personally, I don't find most of those comments as bullying. Harsh and uncouth, maybe, but in my opinion bullying requires there to not be a cause for the criticism. In this case, there is every cause for criticism.

None of the comments you quote stand out as more than harsh criticism either. There's no bullying going on. The people pushing this proposal should be held to account for their actions, and it's moronic to argue otherwise.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. Didn't they scan after the photo was taken not just before upload to the cloud? If so, that is very significant into my mind.