6 ms·

I'm hesitant to even comment in threads on this topic it's so blown out of proportion in modern western society but some of the absurd things implied need to be

I'm hesitant to even comment in threads on this topic it's so blown out of proportion in modern western society but some of the absurd things implied need to be addressed. >Telegram implicitly allows the trading of CSAM in private channels. You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." So...what about addressing the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors offline in the same way? Are we going to start saying that all inhabited spaces should be monitored by government cameras? Should all mail/packages be opened and read/scanned? Why are online spaces different than offline spaces? I'd argue it's because the people writing crap like this depend on FUD and ignorance to push their agendas and they have a monetary incentive in applying FUD to all digital spaces. >Gift card swapping and exchanges, such as G2G, are a critical part of the monetization of SG-CSAM, allowing anonymous compensation for content. Going to ban cash then too? This article is shallow, ignorant self promotion of their dept. to get more funding. It's almost offensive how they're exploiting chldren's safety for this purpose.

alexb_ 3y ago
> Are we going to start saying that all inhabited spaces should be monitored by government cameras? "Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐ style in‐ home government surveillance cameras. 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor 'the government installing surveillance cameras in every household' in order to 'reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,'" >Going to ban cash then too? "Interestingly, more than half (53 percent) of those who support the United States adopting a CBDC are also supportive of government surveillance cameras in homes, while only 2 percent of those who oppose a CBDC feel the same," https://reason.com/2023/06/07/why-are-so-many-younger-americans-okay-with-big-brother-monitoring-their-homes/ https://reason.com/2023/06/07/why-are-so-many-younger-americ... There might be a very worrying ideological shift in how people view their own privacy.
- jackmott42 3y ago
  Or maybe young people have new values than we do and we should let them do their thing. Trust they will figure out, since they are not any less clever than we are.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    They may be clever but they lack wisdom of experience.
    - jonas21 3y ago
      Funny, that's what the older folks said about us when we were young.
      - jedberg 3y ago
        And they were right then too. We also lacked wisdom.
        flangola7 3y ago
        Buy they weren't right. There's a reason boomers fall for obvious scams and fake Facebook posts.
        jedberg 3y ago
        Because they are elderly and their minds don't work as well. When we were kids our grandparents were being scammed via letters and phone calls. It has nothing to do with wisdom. Combining youthful new ideas tempered by the wisdom of experience is the ideal situation. The young person needs to accept that the older person may have already tried what they are suggesting, and the older person needs to accept that the younger person is capable of coming up with new interesting ideas that may be different than what their experience was.
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    Not if it affects me.
  - zaroth 3y ago
    Or maybe they lack either the wisdom or experience to understand the extraordinary danger that comes with ceding privacy and autonomy to an unaccountable government.
- hungryforcodes 3y ago
  ...why do we believe any of this is true though?
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Because we can see evidence of it right here on HN almost every day. Once upon a time hackers in general were at the forefront of the fight for privacy, nowadays we seem to be the vanguard of its wholesale destruction.
  - alexb_ 3y ago
    I can say, anecdotally, people I've asked about their privacy will quite literally tell me that they don't care because they have nothing to hide.
- dmm 3y ago
  > are also supportive of government surveillance cameras in homes How about a compromise? If you want to do crime you can turn the cameras off for an hour a day. /s Homes are already filled with cameras and mics that they don't ultimately control. All it would take is a change in policy to begin using these against you.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I'd be really cautious against reading too much into this. I think often times with this type of polling data, when you dig into the details you find that people aren't as far apart as you might think, but it's more that people tend to focus on different parts of how the question is asked. The original survey data is at https://www.cato.org/blog/nearly-third-gen-z-favors-home-government-surveillance-cameras-1 https://www.cato.org/blog/nearly-third-gen-z-favors-home-gov... (I'd also note this post is from the libertarian Cato Institute, so it's important to understand where their motivation comes from). The exact question was "Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?" It's not hard for me to think that younger people, many of whom just went through years of "Zoom school" and essentially had governmental authority piped into their homes, would just focus on "sure, reducing domestic violence and abuse is a good thing". Alternatively, you see that minorities, particularly African Americans are much more in favor than white Americans (33% vs. 9%). It's possible some people are coming at this from the point of view of "yeah, this would be like police body cameras ensuring that I'm not the victim of false reporting." I don't mean to whitewash the differences, and as someone who thinks the idea of government installing cameras in your home is the absolute definition of "the end of the free world", I don't mean to minimize it. But I think you might get very different responses if you just asked "Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household?" without the rationale behind it. I also think that if you dug into it and asked people follow up questions (e.g. "Where should these cameras be installed") you would get more agreement. I guess my overall point is that I think the differences in responses have more to do with how people interpret the question (though it's certainly fair to be concerned about that) than more fundamental differences around "comfort with government in my bedroom" that the Cato Institute's interpretation might lead one to believe.
  - alexb_ 3y ago
    I don't see how this invalidates the data at all. If/when government surviellance is pushed into our homes, "to protect people" will absolutely be the reasoning used. I agree that zoom school and body cams might be responsible for this shift in mentality. But that doesn't make it a good thing. All you've done in your rebuttal is state the reasons why attitudes towards government surveillance have shifted - you don't actually dispute that the difference exists.
adammarples 3y ago
Not to say you're wrong, but the initial answers to those questions are A) online spaces are pretty much only for trading information, unlike housing which is for sleeping, cooking, general use. B) gift card exchanges are pretty much only for suspect stuff, unlike cash which is much more generally used
- superkuh 3y ago
  I live in online spaces (chat rooms, forums, etc) much more than I live in physical spaces (bars, city council meetings, etc) and I'm pushing 40. I imagine the younger generation's lives are even more in online spaces. The internet is no longer just silly geocities sites and hampsterdance. People live here. re: gift cards, yeah, gift cards are kind of lame. But attacking people's means to transfer value in the new digital living spaces is bad. Even if they're sometimes used for bad things.
jedberg 3y ago
I feel like we have an uphill battle here. Most people these days are ok with government surveillance in the name of "safety". Go to a local city council meeting where they are discussing automatic ticket cameras and facial recognition in public places. Most people are totally ok with that. As Ben Franklin said: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- throwway120385 3y ago
  If it's someone else's liberty to put me in danger, it's not really a liberty I want to defend. Speed cameras are a pretty good example of a surveillance technology that exists because a few self-centered people rip through residential areas at high speed. These people endanger everyone around them for their own sense of enjoyment and they should be fined for that. I agree with you about facial recognition but you're absolutely wrong to apply that principal to speed cameras. I'm all for privacy but as a user of the road you have a responsibility to use it safely, and speeders are not safe users of the road. They should get ticketed as much as possible.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    I agree with you in principle, but it's a fine line to walk. What about China's social credit score? It's all based on surveillance cameras that doc you points for breaking petty laws like jaywalking or littering. Yes, both are safety issues, but at what cost?
    - throwway120385 3y ago
      No it's really not a fine line. If you do something that harms someone else I think society should be able to curtail your liberty. Social credit is not really the same thing because when you speed you're increasing the likelihood of a devastating crash with another driver or a pedestrian. Having witnessed just such a thing a couple of weeks ago and having rendered aid, I can assure you there is very real harm. It is not something I will forget.
  - 3y ago
mindslight 3y ago
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy strikes again. "SG-CSAM". Talk about jumping the shark. I don't know if it's possible to demonstrate consent any harder than someone taking pictures of themselves. And to the point that minors might be doing something that they don't fully understand the implications of - that is an issue of age-appropriateness better addressed by parental guidance rather than federal felonies. And the current legal regime is basically the strongest possible set up for parents to avoid trying to engage with their children's activities.
- amluto 3y ago
  To be fair, the article says, right at the beginning (emphasis added): > selling self-generated illicit sexual content There are at least three things going on here, done by three different entities: 1. Someone creates the material (the “SG-CSAM”). Let’s refrain from nitpicking about the A in CSAM there. 2. Someone operates (usually for profit!) the forum on which the material is transmitted. And some of these forums (accidentally?) help match buyers and sellers. 3. Someone buys (and I guess requests?) the material. I think it’s pretty clear that #3 is frowned upon and is quite illegal in most jurisdictions. The article is largely about #2. #1 is interesting. It’s not the same thing as the usual concept of sexting. The article does not argue that #1 is or should be a crime. I personally find online content recommendations systems to be deeply problematic, and the (emergent?) behavior of Instagram’s that the article discusses is rather distressing.
  - mindslight 3y ago
    > I personally find online content recommendations systems to be deeply problematic I'm right there with you, and have wished for these needless centralizers to crash and burn for decades now. But if we imagine that Instagram/Twitter/etc were out of the picture and these kids were selling their wares on decentralized P2P platforms - it would seem that the main thing that would change would be a lack of possibility to centrally study and police the behavior. In other words point #2 and thus the whole focus of the article would vanish, yet the overall behavior would still exist. Looking at it in those terms, it feels a bit ridiculous to be pinning blame on centralized platforms for having not fully controlled their users, when a fully efficient market just wouldn't have those centralized choke points in the first place.
jstarfish 3y ago
This is just whataboutism. The online aspect facilitates this shit around the entire fucking planet. Online abstracts a lot of the "creepiness." You're going to be less inclined to take Polaroids of yourself to hand off to some sweaty mouthbreather hanging out the back of a panel van than you will taking selfies to send to some faceless internet "boyfriend." As a quick example, here's a bunch of accounts of online grooming by anonymous females: https://lolcow.farm/ot/res/303056.html https://lolcow.farm/ot/res/303056.html I don't believe these sorts of stories anymore (too much Munchausen-by-Internet these days), but one common feature is: intended victims panicking once things got physical/"real." Being offline is a wake-up call. Nobody is mailing shit to anyone. That's not a Thing.
secalex 3y ago
Hi, I'm one of the authors of the report. You have pretty significantly misread it. > You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." The issue with Telegram is that they explicitly disallow the posting of "illegal pornography" on public channels, but not privately. We are not calling for any additional monitoring, but private Telegram groups (which are not E2EE, btw) turn out to be a centerpiece of the commercialization of online child sexual abuse. > Going to ban cash then too? Nope. The paper makes no recommendations around banning gift card platforms, but we do think they might want to take steps when teenagers are publicly linking to their payment wallets next to a price list that includes bestiality videos or content created when the child was pre-pubescent. > This article is shallow, ignorant self promotion of their dept. to get more funding. It's almost offensive how they're exploiting chldren's safety for this purpose. Thanks for reading!
amluto 3y ago
> You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." The article is IMO utterly failing to distinguish between what I think are two products that are very, very different. On the one hand, there’s Telegram, which is effectively a private, unmonitored space. On the other hand: > Instagram's popularity and user-friendly interface make it a preferred option for these activities. The platform's recommendation algorithms effectively advertise SG-CSAM: these algorithms analyze user behaviors and content consumption to suggest related content and accounts to follow. That is not a private, unmonitored space. I tend to think that service providers that recommend content should be responsible for their recommendations.
zamfi 3y ago
Anything can be slippery-sloped into being horrifying for privacy. If there were some kind of sensor that could detect, say, physical child abuse and nothing else—no video, no audio, just a binary yes/no is there physical child abuse (assuming an appropriate statutory definition of physical child abuse) you bet there would be lots of demand for that sensor -- and you could have reasonable conversations about false positives, risks of other data getting out, etc. The difference between Telegram private chats and "unmonitored housing" is that the former has that kind of sensor available, and the latter doesn't.

alexb_ 3y ago

> Are we going to start saying that all inhabited spaces should be monitored by government cameras? "Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐ style in‐ home government surveillance cameras. 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor 'the government installing surveillance cameras in every household' in order to 'reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,'" >Going to ban cash then too? "Interestingly, more than half (53 percent) of those who support the United States adopting a CBDC are also supportive of government surveillance cameras in homes, while only 2 percent of those who oppose a CBDC feel the same," https://reason.com/2023/06/07/why-are-so-many-younger-americans-okay-with-big-brother-monitoring-their-homes/ https://reason.com/2023/06/07/why-are-so-many-younger-americ... There might be a very worrying ideological shift in how people view their own privacy.

jackmott42 3y ago
Or maybe young people have new values than we do and we should let them do their thing. Trust they will figure out, since they are not any less clever than we are.
- jedberg 3y ago
  They may be clever but they lack wisdom of experience.
  - jonas21 3y ago
    Funny, that's what the older folks said about us when we were young.
    - jedberg 3y ago
      And they were right then too. We also lacked wisdom.
      - flangola7 3y ago
        Buy they weren't right. There's a reason boomers fall for obvious scams and fake Facebook posts.
        jedberg 3y ago
        Because they are elderly and their minds don't work as well. When we were kids our grandparents were being scammed via letters and phone calls. It has nothing to do with wisdom. Combining youthful new ideas tempered by the wisdom of experience is the ideal situation. The young person needs to accept that the older person may have already tried what they are suggesting, and the older person needs to accept that the younger person is capable of coming up with new interesting ideas that may be different than what their experience was.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  Not if it affects me.
- zaroth 3y ago
  Or maybe they lack either the wisdom or experience to understand the extraordinary danger that comes with ceding privacy and autonomy to an unaccountable government.
hungryforcodes 3y ago
...why do we believe any of this is true though?
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Because we can see evidence of it right here on HN almost every day. Once upon a time hackers in general were at the forefront of the fight for privacy, nowadays we seem to be the vanguard of its wholesale destruction.
- alexb_ 3y ago
  I can say, anecdotally, people I've asked about their privacy will quite literally tell me that they don't care because they have nothing to hide.
dmm 3y ago
> are also supportive of government surveillance cameras in homes How about a compromise? If you want to do crime you can turn the cameras off for an hour a day. /s Homes are already filled with cameras and mics that they don't ultimately control. All it would take is a change in policy to begin using these against you.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I'd be really cautious against reading too much into this. I think often times with this type of polling data, when you dig into the details you find that people aren't as far apart as you might think, but it's more that people tend to focus on different parts of how the question is asked. The original survey data is at https://www.cato.org/blog/nearly-third-gen-z-favors-home-government-surveillance-cameras-1 https://www.cato.org/blog/nearly-third-gen-z-favors-home-gov... (I'd also note this post is from the libertarian Cato Institute, so it's important to understand where their motivation comes from). The exact question was "Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?" It's not hard for me to think that younger people, many of whom just went through years of "Zoom school" and essentially had governmental authority piped into their homes, would just focus on "sure, reducing domestic violence and abuse is a good thing". Alternatively, you see that minorities, particularly African Americans are much more in favor than white Americans (33% vs. 9%). It's possible some people are coming at this from the point of view of "yeah, this would be like police body cameras ensuring that I'm not the victim of false reporting." I don't mean to whitewash the differences, and as someone who thinks the idea of government installing cameras in your home is the absolute definition of "the end of the free world", I don't mean to minimize it. But I think you might get very different responses if you just asked "Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household?" without the rationale behind it. I also think that if you dug into it and asked people follow up questions (e.g. "Where should these cameras be installed") you would get more agreement. I guess my overall point is that I think the differences in responses have more to do with how people interpret the question (though it's certainly fair to be concerned about that) than more fundamental differences around "comfort with government in my bedroom" that the Cato Institute's interpretation might lead one to believe.
- alexb_ 3y ago
  I don't see how this invalidates the data at all. If/when government surviellance is pushed into our homes, "to protect people" will absolutely be the reasoning used. I agree that zoom school and body cams might be responsible for this shift in mentality. But that doesn't make it a good thing. All you've done in your rebuttal is state the reasons why attitudes towards government surveillance have shifted - you don't actually dispute that the difference exists.

adammarples 3y ago

Not to say you're wrong, but the initial answers to those questions are A) online spaces are pretty much only for trading information, unlike housing which is for sleeping, cooking, general use. B) gift card exchanges are pretty much only for suspect stuff, unlike cash which is much more generally used

superkuh 3y ago
I live in online spaces (chat rooms, forums, etc) much more than I live in physical spaces (bars, city council meetings, etc) and I'm pushing 40. I imagine the younger generation's lives are even more in online spaces. The internet is no longer just silly geocities sites and hampsterdance. People live here. re: gift cards, yeah, gift cards are kind of lame. But attacking people's means to transfer value in the new digital living spaces is bad. Even if they're sometimes used for bad things.

jedberg 3y ago

I feel like we have an uphill battle here. Most people these days are ok with government surveillance in the name of "safety". Go to a local city council meeting where they are discussing automatic ticket cameras and facial recognition in public places. Most people are totally ok with that. As Ben Franklin said: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

throwway120385 3y ago
If it's someone else's liberty to put me in danger, it's not really a liberty I want to defend. Speed cameras are a pretty good example of a surveillance technology that exists because a few self-centered people rip through residential areas at high speed. These people endanger everyone around them for their own sense of enjoyment and they should be fined for that. I agree with you about facial recognition but you're absolutely wrong to apply that principal to speed cameras. I'm all for privacy but as a user of the road you have a responsibility to use it safely, and speeders are not safe users of the road. They should get ticketed as much as possible.
- jedberg 3y ago
  I agree with you in principle, but it's a fine line to walk. What about China's social credit score? It's all based on surveillance cameras that doc you points for breaking petty laws like jaywalking or littering. Yes, both are safety issues, but at what cost?
  - throwway120385 3y ago
    No it's really not a fine line. If you do something that harms someone else I think society should be able to curtail your liberty. Social credit is not really the same thing because when you speed you're increasing the likelihood of a devastating crash with another driver or a pedestrian. Having witnessed just such a thing a couple of weeks ago and having rendered aid, I can assure you there is very real harm. It is not something I will forget.
- 3y ago

mindslight 3y ago

Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy strikes again. "SG-CSAM". Talk about jumping the shark. I don't know if it's possible to demonstrate consent any harder than someone taking pictures of themselves. And to the point that minors might be doing something that they don't fully understand the implications of - that is an issue of age-appropriateness better addressed by parental guidance rather than federal felonies. And the current legal regime is basically the strongest possible set up for parents to avoid trying to engage with their children's activities.

amluto 3y ago
To be fair, the article says, right at the beginning (emphasis added): > selling self-generated illicit sexual content There are at least three things going on here, done by three different entities: 1. Someone creates the material (the “SG-CSAM”). Let’s refrain from nitpicking about the A in CSAM there. 2. Someone operates (usually for profit!) the forum on which the material is transmitted. And some of these forums (accidentally?) help match buyers and sellers. 3. Someone buys (and I guess requests?) the material. I think it’s pretty clear that #3 is frowned upon and is quite illegal in most jurisdictions. The article is largely about #2. #1 is interesting. It’s not the same thing as the usual concept of sexting. The article does not argue that #1 is or should be a crime. I personally find online content recommendations systems to be deeply problematic, and the (emergent?) behavior of Instagram’s that the article discusses is rather distressing.
- mindslight 3y ago
  > I personally find online content recommendations systems to be deeply problematic I'm right there with you, and have wished for these needless centralizers to crash and burn for decades now. But if we imagine that Instagram/Twitter/etc were out of the picture and these kids were selling their wares on decentralized P2P platforms - it would seem that the main thing that would change would be a lack of possibility to centrally study and police the behavior. In other words point #2 and thus the whole focus of the article would vanish, yet the overall behavior would still exist. Looking at it in those terms, it feels a bit ridiculous to be pinning blame on centralized platforms for having not fully controlled their users, when a fully efficient market just wouldn't have those centralized choke points in the first place.

jstarfish 3y ago

This is just whataboutism. The online aspect facilitates this shit around the entire fucking planet. Online abstracts a lot of the "creepiness." You're going to be less inclined to take Polaroids of yourself to hand off to some sweaty mouthbreather hanging out the back of a panel van than you will taking selfies to send to some faceless internet "boyfriend." As a quick example, here's a bunch of accounts of online grooming by anonymous females: https://lolcow.farm/ot/res/303056.html https://lolcow.farm/ot/res/303056.html I don't believe these sorts of stories anymore (too much Munchausen-by-Internet these days), but one common feature is: intended victims panicking once things got physical/"real." Being offline is a wake-up call. Nobody is mailing shit to anyone. That's not a Thing.

secalex 3y ago

Hi, I'm one of the authors of the report. You have pretty significantly misread it. > You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." The issue with Telegram is that they explicitly disallow the posting of "illegal pornography" on public channels, but not privately. We are not calling for any additional monitoring, but private Telegram groups (which are not E2EE, btw) turn out to be a centerpiece of the commercialization of online child sexual abuse. > Going to ban cash then too? Nope. The paper makes no recommendations around banning gift card platforms, but we do think they might want to take steps when teenagers are publicly linking to their payment wallets next to a price list that includes bestiality videos or content created when the child was pre-pubescent. > This article is shallow, ignorant self promotion of their dept. to get more funding. It's almost offensive how they're exploiting chldren's safety for this purpose. Thanks for reading!

amluto 3y ago

> You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM." The article is IMO utterly failing to distinguish between what I think are two products that are very, very different. On the one hand, there’s Telegram, which is effectively a private, unmonitored space. On the other hand: > Instagram's popularity and user-friendly interface make it a preferred option for these activities. The platform's recommendation algorithms effectively advertise SG-CSAM: these algorithms analyze user behaviors and content consumption to suggest related content and accounts to follow. That is not a private, unmonitored space. I tend to think that service providers that recommend content should be responsible for their recommendations.

zamfi 3y ago

Anything can be slippery-sloped into being horrifying for privacy. If there were some kind of sensor that could detect, say, physical child abuse and nothing else—no video, no audio, just a binary yes/no is there physical child abuse (assuming an appropriate statutory definition of physical child abuse) you bet there would be lots of demand for that sensor -- and you could have reasonable conversations about false positives, risks of other data getting out, etc. The difference between Telegram private chats and "unmonitored housing" is that the former has that kind of sensor available, and the latter doesn't.