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With respect, you did not further the discussion. You turned it round and ran it backwards, misleading an unknown number of people in the process. > But in tha
by cnity 2y ago
With respect, you did not further the discussion. You turned it round and ran it backwards, misleading an unknown number of people in the process.
> But in that case, ... WhatsApp, ... can (and probably do) already spy on me and my pictures.
This is just factually false. Research end-to-end encryption.
> I don't think it's all that draconian for authorities to take a look, too, after you have already voluntarily !!! sent them to a for-profit corp with questionable morals.
It's time for this idea to end. Communications platforms are no longer "voluntary" any more than, say, using electricity from the grid is "voluntary". Sure, I could just not speak to anyone in my family anymore, or share photos with them. I can cut myself off from broader society? That's the alternative? The thing with politics is _we get to choose_. We get to fight for a future that actually works for us. We don't have to settle for this kind of ridiculous choice.
> And I feel like the proposed law design also matches with the real risk profile. Pretty much all of the blackmailing scams that drove teenagers to suicide were being perpetuated from outside the country that the victim was living in, e.g. [1].
Steel-manning your argument for a second. Yes, there are risks to privacy. There is a real risk of domestic violence in the home. There is a real risk of sharing CSAM, or scams, or any number of shady human behaviour.
> So it makes a lot of sense to more tightly control cross-country online messaging on almost anonymous platforms than in-person photo sharing.
But this takes it too far. It only makes sense if you are min-maxing on crime enabled by the existence of privacy, and care about _absolutely nothing else_. You also place a huge amount of trust in governments to wield this overpowered tool in good faith, from now until the end of time. This kind of change is extremely difficult to reverse without violent revolt. Two or three decades from now, when the governments decide that actually, we should try to predict risk factors for future crime (with 99.99% accuracy!), will you be there supporting it?
- fxtentacle 2y agoSadly, "end-to-end encryption" by itself does not guarantee what happens before content is encrypted or after it is decrypted, meaning Facebook can easily spy on your private stuff by sending the data out via a side channel. There's also nothing stopping them from running an AI model on your (still-unencrypted) data before they send it. I agree with you that we shouldn't consider communications platforms as "voluntary" anymore. In my opinion, that means we want to hold them to stricter regulation, like we do with utilities like electrical companies. I wonder if that could actually be used as a an argument in favor of moving the content scanning from what Facebook is already doing towards a government agency. At least in theory, it should be easier for the public to hold a government agency accountable, than for example Facebook's moderation team. I appreciate your slippery slope argument and I agree. Allowing the existence of these tools places a large amount of trust in governments. But to me, it looks like the only alternative is to trust private companies who already are doing such scanning. And to me, that seems even worse.
- cnity 2y agoThank you for taking such a good perspective and providing interesting thoughts despite me taking a fairly argumentative oppositional debate style. It's uncommon and has made me rethink my approach. You do raise some interesting points about private vs. public misuse of data that I don't think I can expand on right now, but I'm going to let that percolate. That said, there's a world worth striving for in which the public services that work for us, do indeed work for us. They act as a force which seeks a safe and prosperous society without having to compromise on privacy. In fact, introducing backdoors like this undermine our privacy in a way which actually could lead to an unsafe society, ironically. Trusting governments to use these tools is like trusting governments to distrust us, which seems basically like a bad idea.
- arp242 2y ago> With respect, you did not further the discussion. You turned it round and ran it backwards, misleading an unknown number of people in the process. They posted their opinion. An opinion you may intently dislike, but that's allowed. Phrasing that as "you did not further the discussion" is profoundly unkind. > This is just factually false. Research end-to-end encryption. E2E and client-side scanning are entirely compatible; E2E just says what's sent over the wire, and nothing more. I don't know if WA does any kind of scanning or not, but they certainly could if they wanted to. They could also record every single keystroke if they wanted for example. That's the entire point of this: to have some protections without weakening the encryption. Whether that's a good method or not is obviously a highly controversial matter, but pitting it against E2E fundamentally misunderstands what this is about.