If you have references to also help me piece this together I'd find that really helpful.

> Last year, for instance, Apple reported 265 cases to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, while Facebook reported 20.3 million

According to [1] it does seem like Apple didn't do any wide scale scanning of iCloud Data.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/technology/apple-iphones-...

If they weren't doing any scanning why would they find any to report? The data is encrypted as rest so... why would they find any to report. This clearly doesn't include search requests [1].

iCloud has perhaps 25% of the users of Facebook. Of that 25% it's not clear how many actively use the platform of backups/photos. iCloud is not a platform for sharing content like Facebook. So how many reports should we expect to see from Apple? It's unclear to me.

So, I'm not saying the number isn't suspiciously low. But it doesn't really clarify what's going on to me...

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/pdf/requests-2018-H...

Forbes had the only evidence based reporting where they cited a court case where Apple automatically detected known CSAM in attachments to iCloud Mail: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/02/11/how-a...

Everyone else is making inferences from a chance to their privacy policy and a statement made by a company lawyer.