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You're right. But apparently every time this topic comes up we cry that this is abuse of our freedom. Tech is not good or bad but it does have unintended cons
by throwaway290 2y ago
You're right. But apparently every time this topic comes up we cry that this is abuse of our freedom.
Tech is not good or bad but it does have unintended consequences and open new ways for abuse. This is tough to swallow for us who work in tech but is obvious to everyone else. If we stay in denial and do not volunteer to help use tech smartly to compensate for bad side effects, they will vote in some dumb law and some bad guys will exploit it for surveillance later.
- BurningFrog 2y agoGovernment recording all our conversations also has have "unintended" consequences. The track record of such societies is rather terrifying.
- throwaway290 2y agoYou think I disagree? My point is almost exactly the same, we should stop that (by promoting a saner solution).
- yencabulator 2y agoSo, what's an example saner solution? Or is this one of those "just" sentences?
- throwaway290 2y agoIs it as "just" as "just ignore the abuse and keep making tools used for that purpose"?
- yencabulator 2y agoOf all the things potentially worthy of "just", the status quo sounds most appropriate. But I think you not being able to state what a saner solution is is enough for this conversation.
- throwaway290 2y agoKnowing you value minuscule amount of privacy over another person's life and suffering was already plenty.
- Hizonner 2y agoThere is in fact no "smart" way to compensate for this particular "bad side effect". Either your communications are spied on to weed out unapproved material, or they're not. And there is no way to make the system architecture care about which material is allowed to be "unapproved". The right answer here is just to accept that, beyond a certain point, further reducing the amount of circulating child porn requires unacceptable tradeoffs. Then stop whining and wishing for impossible technical solutions.
- benfortuna 2y agoThere is in fact. You could build AI directly into the app to detect inappropriate content and block it. The app has thus not violated end-to-end encryption, nor has that content been exposed to external parties. Platforms could definitely do more.
- shinryuu 2y agoAnd how do you deal with all false positives. That will just be deemed collateral damage?
- hellojesus 2y agoTo add to your excellent point, who gets to validate the models efficacy? How do we know the state hadn't trained it to report users talking about maga, or Isreal, or for those with Chinese national lovers?
- throwaway290 2y agoHow do you deal with all those UUIDs colliding? You can design a system where false positives are so rare they are insignificant and can be properly handled. The only reason we don't is because we don't think it's that much of a problem.
- Hizonner 2y agoNo, you can't. Machine learning doesn't work that way. You can keep the false positive level reasonably low for copies of already known and flagged images. You can't do it for new images.