Honestly, on HN I feel there is much more disdain for my position. Given the world we're in, Facebook being able to assist law enforcement around child abuse, s

Honestly, on HN I feel there is much more disdain for my position. Given the world we're in, Facebook being able to assist law enforcement around child abuse, sexual slavery and human trafficking provides a lot of value. I feel people on HN are underestimating the extent of these issues, underweighting their severity, and overstating the dangers of letting Facebook store private data. Estimates say there are something like 20-40 million slaves in the world, and that 50,000 people are trafficked per annum in the USA. Something like 20% of slaves are sold for sex. Facebook is believed to be a common platform to facilitate this, though I haven't been able to find numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century In contrast, despite the occasional news post of a particularly incompetent company leaking a database of plaintext passwords, Facebook's data storage is pretty safe, and encryption does still afford a lot of protection. The idea that hundreds of thousands of people are going to have their private data extracted from Facebook through individual attacks against the servers is not well corroborated. Totalitarianism is an important long-tail risk, but I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that these programmes are a path to it. Overall privacy rights quite plausibly are, but that issue exists primarily as a matter of policy and law, not as a matter of technology. If the laws are bad, Facebook illegally preventing protection of trafficking victims will not help those laws change to a more moderate position, and if the laws are reasonable, cooperating to prevent trafficking victims would not be harmful to positive political outcomes. The scale of abuses would have to be multiple orders of magnitude smaller, or detection mechanisms incredibly ineffective, before this tradeoff made sense to me. <braces for backlash>