I find this stuff very alarming. The reporting in TFA about European politics (and the recent Heat Initiative pressure campaign here in the US) illustrate how m

I find this stuff very alarming. The reporting in TFA about European politics (and the recent Heat Initiative pressure campaign here in the US) illustrate how much unaccountable dark money is flowing into these causes. I don’t think that there are huge pools of anonymous donor cash looking to influence child-safety campaigns for the sake of anyone caring about children, because that’s not typically how altruistic donors donate their money. Instead I think it’s likely that some commercial interests see a lucrative financial opportunity in this private data (either selling AI-based scanning tools, or mining it directly as a service.) This data is currently locked up with big firms like Apple and Meta, who are (for various reasons) leaning towards encrypting it rather than exploiting its contents, and the way to solve this problem involves passing laws through naive legislatures who don’t understand what they’re doing. And frankly that possibility worries me much more than where I thought we were previously - which was just a boring dispute between government and tech firms.