- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Once a system like this is up and running, nothing is stopping a government from abusing it.
Oh actually, we think it’d be a good idea to broaden its capabilities to do stuff we’ve never explicitely mentioned before. You don’t mind, do you?
I wish a big company would go against the grain on the child protection issue.
Everyone wants to protect children, but child predators aren’t going to be storing their abuse materials on the cloud.
Johansson, however, has not blinked. “The privacy advocates sound very loud,” the commissioner said in a speech in November 2021. “But someone must also speak for the children.”
Fuck the children.
Well, don’t fuck the children…
The arrogance of her statement is really frustrating. People who know more about this domain than you do are telling you it’s a bad idea, you shithead!
I don’t understand how “client-side scanning” - i.e. an invasive piece of code pushed by OS makers to YOUR computer or mobile device to scan YOUR files without your consent - is even being discussed.
This is tantamount to an Apple or Google rep forcibly entering your house, sitting on the couch next to you in your living room and reporting to the mothership or the police what you watch on TV. People would take to the street if this was mandated by law. Yet they seem to be waiting for the Apple or Google rep to sit on their device and report what files you have in it with complete resignation.
How did we get here? This obscene proposal would have been a major scandal not 25 year ago. Actually it wouldn’t even have been proposed at all. But today it’s on the verge of becoming law! The mind boggles…
Oh, something very similar has been proposed already some time ago, just under the guise of stopping terrorism. That excuse evidently doesn’t work anymore.
After about thirty years, politicians have realised that you can’t break encryption without also leaking their own secrets, eventually.
If the system was transparent, open, and provided an easy way to get false positive sorted, I wouldn’t necessarily even have a problem with the concept.
If the choice is between this or banning E2EE like the EU and UK tried to do, I would prefer client side scanning. However, this fake binary is exactly what politicians want you to think of.
You know how illegal shit gets shared to the masses? Telegram channels. Unencrypted, tied to phone numbers, publicly available if you just know the link. Sure, a bunch of pedos will use top of the line encryption and try to get perfect OPSEC, but that’s extremely hard to pull off, even for seasoned professionals.
Automatic scanning isn’t a solution to a lack of knowledgeable officers and a lack of public prosecutors getting their shit together. Politicians don’t like the idea of someone using encryption to get away with disgusting shit, and that’s enough for them to come up with ridiculous laws.
If the system was transparent, open, and provided an easy way to get false positive sorted, I wouldn’t necessarily even have a problem with the concept.
How can you even say that?
This is what baffles me the most: how does anyone even entertain the idea of letting a third-party scan their own files on their own device uninvited? Even if the process is transparent and there’s a 100% fool-proof way of taking care of false positives, the very idea of letting anyone scan anything on my computers in the first place is completely unacceptable!
People would have never deeemed anything like this even remotely acceptable 25 years ago. But in 2023, enough people have internalized the idea enough that this actually has a chance to become law without creating an outrage. I am utterly distressed by what society is willing to accept nowadays.
That’s why I put the conditions “if the system was transparent, open, and provided an easy way to get false positive sorted” on there. That’s like saying “if people were good, I’d believe in communism”. In the real world, these conditions will never be met.
We have antivirus software and it works just fine without sending samples to the mothership (though it does work a lot better if you let it upload stuff to their sandboxes). The theory behind the system is solid and well-intentioned people working together can make a real difference.
A big problem I’m seeing with this debate is that politicians aren’t going to give up on trying to enforce scannability of all messages. “I don’t want nothing of the government on my device!” is how you get a 2030 law banning Linux on the desktop. Every politician of every political party has heard every argument by every activist. Everyone in the general public has heard how bad the concept is. Nobody is capable of stopping the inevitable legal attack on properly private messages.
I think we can get more people behind this if messenger apps are willing to work together and show people the implications in terms they understand. If WhatsApp shows “Ursula von der Leyen (EU) has been added to the chat” to every chatroom and adds a label “No problem, only
x% chance of child porn content” on every image or meme shared (wherexis just the percentage of pixels with a skin color hue), people would riot. Maybe add random emoji responses by “Ursula” too just to remind everyone that she’s watching. Of course no app will ever want to spook their users like that, but I think it’s the only way to stop this movement.I’m very pessimistic about the future. We’ve had useful encryption for about 20 years after it being considered a military secret for hundreds or even thousands of years, and I think we’ll eventually lose it again.
Google has been doing it on drive for years now. False positives have been several times reported to the police, despite a human reviewing it
Yeah but that’s different: you entrust files to Google drive. It’s their digital real estate: I expect them to do whatever they want with what you put on it. If you don’t want false-positives, don’t send your files to Google.
But your cellphone or your computer at home is your digital real-estate. It’s your home. I for one do not welcome Google in my home, and I absolutely refuse to let them see what’s inside my home.
Because really, client-side scanning is nothing more than home invasion.
Keep in mind that one of the leading organizations pushing laws like this is Thorn. You know, the one Ashton Kutcher ran. You know, the guy who sent a letter to a judge asking for leniency for a convicted serial rapist. All these laws are smokescreens to take away people’s right to privacy and dissent.
I’m all for the fight against child abuse but these actions are under the guise of fighting child abuse. Now if government implemented awareness, destigmatization of abuser so they can seek help. And dealt with core issues rather then chasing the shit storm thats already been and gone, well wed have a far better society. Its really about control though, once you’ve got money, a high societie social group what else is there
It’s never about creating a better society, just oppression and exploitation. The more criminals you easily fabricate, the more indentured servants you easily get.
