Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

Apple’s scanning system for CSAM. The vast majority of the debate was dominated by how people imagined it worked, which was very different to how it actually worked.

It was an extremely interesting effort where you could tell a huge amount of thought and effort went into making it as privacy-preserving as possible. I’m not convinced it’s a great idea, but it was a substantial improvement over what is in widespread use today and I wanted there to be a reasonable debate on it instead of knee-jerk outrage. But congrats, I guess. All the cloud hosting systems scan what they want anyway, and the one that was actually designed with privacy in mind got screamed out of existence by people who didn’t care to learn the first thing about it.

There is no place for spyware of any kind on my phone. Saying that it is to "protect the children" and "to catch terrorists" does not make it any more acceptable.