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Sometimes the slippery slope is not a fallacy, but the natural consequence of seeking more control. This feature can be horribly misused in the future, for exam
by ASalazarMX 5y ago
Sometimes the slippery slope is not a fallacy, but the natural consequence of seeking more control. This feature can be horribly misused in the future, for example, to find people who have sent/received/downloaded Tiannanmen pictures, because instant messaging pictures can be automatically added to your albums.
You can't trust a feature whose only impediment from being abused in the future is such pinky promise.
- eurasiantiger 5y agoAdd hashes of police uniforms and now you cannot take pictures of law enforcement. Add hashes of politicians. Businessmen in suits. Army uniforms. At the end you have a weapon that can only shoot civilians.
- midev 5y agoDo you know how discovery works in court? I'm guessing not. Once a hash matches, law enforcement would need a subpoena to access the raw image. If a person were to be arrested, that evidence would be turned over to the defense. It would be very obvious that a picture of a police officer was not child pornography. Are you under the impression people are jailed for hash collisions? Because that's not the case at all....
- eurasiantiger 5y agoHave you heard of the chilling effect?
- midev 5y agoYeah, which is irrelevant to the discussion. This thread is about photos of law enforcement and politicians used to convict people on CP charges. Let's stick to the topic of discovery and how courts work.
- eurasiantiger 5y agoLet’s conveniently ignore all the facts that speak against the planned dystopia, and focus on the positives of having all facets of your life constrained and controlled by authorities.
- midev 5y agoI'm happy to have that discussion, I think it's critical and we need to update laws to protect privacy. You still don't get to be technically incorrect, though. You still need to know how courts work, if you want to participate in that discussion.
- eurasiantiger 5y agoYou have a lot of trust in your courts. Let’s hope it is not misplaced.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI don't think the suggestion is that a hash of a police uniform will be used to convict of CP but rather the idea that a new law will be passed that - in order to protect the police from 'harassment' - will outlaw taking pictures of the police. So in that case in discovery the picture of a police officer would be evidence that you broke that hypothetical law. The technology deployed to protect the children opens up the possibility of its deployment for other things later, based on legal requirements of course. For example don't take pictures of copyrighted material would be something people might want to work on.
- midev 5y ago> would be evidence that you broke that hypothetical law Hypothetical situations are not an argument to real world discussions. Sure, if that happened, it'd be terrible. But, that's not happening....
- ratsnake 5y agoIt's not hypothetical https://reason.com/2021/07/27/florida-bill-criminalize-filming-cops-first-amendment/ https://reason.com/2021/07/27/florida-bill-criminalize-filmi...
- Osiris 5y agoI think asking ourselves if this is a slippery slope is a valid part of discussing what's actually happening right now.
- midev 5y agoAppealing to the slippery slope is itself a fallacy. "While this image may be insightful for understanding the character of the fallacy, it represents a misunderstanding of the nature of the causal relations between events. Every causal claim requires a separate argument. Hence, any "slipping" to be found is only in the clumsy thinking of the arguer, who has failed to provide sufficient evidence that one causally explained event can serve as an explanation for another event or for a series of events" You need to argue things that are actually happening. Appealing to hypotheticals, especially when technically incorrect, serves no one.
- toast0 5y ago> Once a hash matches, law enforcement would need a subpoena to access the raw image. Not if Apple provides it to them without a subpoena.
- soperj 5y agoIt's like you think everyone operates under US law, or don't give a shit about anyone who doesn't.
- rswail 5y agoI understand your argument, that a court (in a democratic country with a rule of law) would expect that the investigators extract the original image from the accused's phone with the appropriate chain of custody of the evidence. However, that does not mean that while this investigation is under way, the accused is now go about their business. For CP, or other crimes of violence, that makes sense. But if laws are passed against peaceful protest, then that means someone could be held in detention while those photos are investigated. An anonymous photo now is trackable.
- zimpenfish 5y agoOk but PhotoDNA has been doing this scanning for a decade, I believe, and none of these things have happened despite how easy it would seem to be? Or have Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., been doing this with such stealth that no-one has actually noticed it happening yet?
- PartiallyTyped 5y agoRecall that apple devices include an ML accelerator, at some point or another, the next step down this slope will be adding this to the display pipeline. PhotoDNA and similar are done in on-premises machines, nothing on your own private phone.
- barrkel 5y agoThose aren't run on edge devices. Apple's model saves them money and creates a capability - local scanning - which didn't exist before.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- akomtu 5y agoPictures is just a pretense. Step #2 will be URLs of pictures that users send each other using the phone's keyboard. Step #3 will quietly expand the definition of a URL to any keyboard input. At that point, Apple will have a god's eye view into all communications of their users, be it over WhatsApp, Signal, SMS or an online forum. Imagine having a dashboard that shows in realtime with gps coordinates how many text messages contain the word "enough"! The same scanner module can detect certain words in phone calls. What dictator wouldn't want that?
- timcederman 5y agoI started writing an explanation of how you're mistaken, and then I realised just how quickly you went from Apple using a very common method for identifying CSAM (which Facebook already uses, yet I've not really heard much in the way of complaints about that) to Apple wanting to listen for keywords in phone calls, and just how unlikely it is you'd reasonably think through my response.
- feanaro 5y agoPerhaps you're the one who's wrong though? Your response makes no sense other than to grandstand how hasty and unreasonable the OP is being. You could have just omitted it and we'd be no worse off. Does Facebook scan local files?
- ralph84 5y ago> which Facebook already uses A company looking at content uploaded to servers they own is quite different from a company spying on the contents of a device they don’t own.
- stefanve 5y agoIf Apple wanted to do all that they can, they don’t really need a special feature for that and tell te world.
- akomtu 5y agoApple cares about reputation and that's why they test the waters first with these announcements.
- whall6 5y agoJust because the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy doesn’t mean we can’t use our minds to foresee possible next steps.
- AbrahamParangi 5y agoThe slippery slope argument isn't even really a logical fallacy. In fact, I can think of a number of circumstances where it turned out to be true. edit: here's an example of the slippery slope "fallacy" in action "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist."
- zepto 5y agoIt is a logical fallacy in that the consequences do not logically follow from the proposition. However that doesn’t say anything about whether they are likely to follow in practice, only that there is no logical proof that they follow. In this case, the arguments against this mechanism are generatly slippery slope arguments - logic doesn’t guarantee the bad outcomes. However it’s quite reasonable to be concerned that the bad outcomes will happen because of the actors involved.
- anm89 5y agoNot only is it 'not really' a logical fallacy, it really is not a logical fallacy. Check my post on the parent for references.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago>isn't even really a logical fallacy. In fact, I can think of a number of circumstances where it turned out to be true. This represents a very common misunderstanding of fallacies, IIRC it's called the Fallacy Fallacy: fallacies don't give you any information about the truth of the conclusion, they only indicate that the logic that ties that conclusion to the premises is unsound. So "slippery slope fallacy" means "worse things don't logical follow in increments from better things" but that doesn't mean that in any real situation "worse things follow in increments from better things" is not true. The most common example of this misunderstanding is probably Occam's Razor, it says nothing about whether things are or aren't more complex in any real situation, only that it's easy to reason about things if you don't add additional aspects that aren't needed.
- xyzzyz 5y agoIf I learned anything in my lifetime, it’s that “slippery slope” is not, in fact, a fallacy at all. Rather, it’s a rule of thumb.
- itronitron 5y agoAnd if the landscape is changing then the sliding has already started.
- Cederfjard 5y agoIt is only a fallacy when it’s not backed up by solid reasoning. There are obviously slippery slopes. And sometimes they aren’t there, even though people claim they are. It’s a shame that some have been conditioned to immediately make the connection between the two.
- jtc331 5y agoIt’s almost like that conditioning benefits someone.
- delecti 5y agoThere are plenty of examples where it is fallacious though, often absurdly so. The important distinction is: does A abstractly "lead to" B, or does A directly enable B, but for some will to use it that way. For one example, it was always absurd to suggest that gay marriage would lead to legalized pedophilia, bestiality, or marriage to objects.
- docmars 5y agoMeanwhile, trolls and staunch intellectuals demanding "enough" evidence think they can gatekeep what's acceptable to notice is already slipping and gaslight others for noticing and worrying, only to find that years later, the Overton window shifted and newer generations were none the wiser, bringing the things that were previously unacceptable into the mainstream with reckless abandon. (edited for brevity, expanding more on this in a reply...)