Comment by AshamedCaptain

Which is why I point the dangers of accepting this behavior as normal. I'm assuming you mean they could siphon the hashes of my photos through any other channel (e.g. even when calling the mothership to check for updates), but this is not entirely true. For example, were I to take a million photos, such traffic would suspiciously increase proportionally.

If you accept that every photo captured will send traffic to the mothership, like the story here, then that is no longer something you can check, either.

In any case, as others have mentioned, no one cares. In fact, I could argue that the scenario I'm forecasting is exactly what has already happened: the photos app suddenly started sending opaque blobs for every photo captured. A paranoid guy noticed this traffic and asked Apple about it. Apple replied with a flimsy justification, but users then go to ridiculous extremes to justify that this is not Apple spying on them, but a new super-secret-magic-sauce that cannot possibly be used to exfiltrate their data, despite the fact that Apple has provided exactly 0 verifiable assurances about it (and in fact has no way to do so). And the paranoid guy will no longer be able to notice extra per-photo traffic in the future.