7 ms·

Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

116 points by Sami_Lehtinen 2y ago

CJefferson 2y ago
I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but I don't buy that end-to-end encryption will, overall, increase children's safety. I'm happy to see strong evidence one way of the other, but this article is very one-sided. Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communication with whoever they are talking to is end-to-end encrypted. I don't think it's reasonable to make this the parent's responsibility, when basically the whole world is internet connected, and those parents are fighting against multi-billion dollar international corporations, who dedicate huge teams of highly paid people to ensuring children get addicted to their platforms. Looking at the children in my life, it's very hard to keep them off social media, even if you don't give them devices they will just use their friend's, or devices at school.
- epoberezkin 2y ago
  You should understand that you cannot have the cake and eat it. The logic here is very simple: 1) Any scanning messages of children and their parents means providing access to them, effectively removing the protection provided by the encryption. 2) If these messages are accessible to any algorithm or systems, however secure, there is no way to guarantee that the bad actors will be prevented from accessing these messages - it's only the question of time until this information is leaked. 3) If these messages are accessible to bad actors, it will enable more grooming - because they will be used to train language models to more effectively manipulate children and other people. So while politicians can engage in their wishful and magical thinking about some wonderful technology that will allow, what they call, a "lawful access" but at the same time will somehow prevent unlawful access by bad actors, everybody with a bit of technical knowledge understands that it is simply impossible - it's either e2e encrypted and nobody other than the communicating parties can access it, or it is not - and then anybody with resources can access it, including bad actors. That's why they want to scan messages of everybody other than themselves: https://www.eureporter.co/business/data/mass-surveillance-data/2024/04/15/leak-eu-interior-ministers-want-to-exempt-themselves-from-chat-control-bulk-scanning-of-private-messages/ https://www.eureporter.co/business/data/mass-surveillance-da... It was never about protecting children - it is simply about eradicating the privacy as we know it, and preventing any dissent from being formed, and criminalising private conversations in the same way free speech is being criminalised. These ideas are not new - it's just now that they try to weaponise "let's protect the children" narrative to achieve it. The only way to protect children and vulnerable people online is to reduce their discoverability on online platforms, not to expose their communications to enable more efficient grooming - which would be the effect of the scanning.
- _cenw 2y ago
  Most of the abuse already happens on "responsible" platforms that provide zero expectation of privacy, like Discord. Scanners are just not good at finding anyone but second-degree consumers, and that seems to happen more on web forums (and also, focusing attention here doesn't get rid of producers).
- gherkinnn 2y ago
  > those parents are fighting against multi-billion dollar international corporations, who dedicate huge teams of highly paid people to ensuring children get addicted to their platforms So why not put a stop to this then? With any luck we'll come to realise that these platforms and the people working on them are the same scum that run the tobacco industry.
  - CJefferson 2y ago
    I completely agree with you, we will look back on the big social media companies exactly the same way we look at big tobacco, they knew all along the damage they were causing, and spent heroic efforts covering it up to make profits.
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  It could done though, via in channel-system- analysing communication, communicating to parties outside the black box, without monitoring the conversation otherwise. If the NNaNNy detects inapropriate conversations by parties underage, it calls the police.
- derefr 2y ago
  Why does scanning of children's communications need to involve non-E2E-encrypted communication? The parents can just be the admins of their children's devices and tell those devices to capture and report communications before they're encrypted.
  - Arainach 2y ago
    Putting aside that children as a group are brilliant and constantly jailbreaking every kind of device management they are subjected to, the vast majority of parents aren't technical enough to understand this problem much less set themselves up as "admins" and the vast majority of those who are technical enough to understand do not have the time. They're already trying to ensure their children are fed, educated, socialized, emotionally supported, and so on. This is a wonderful example of engineers thinking everything is a technical problem when almost everything is instead an organizational or human problem.
    - derefr 2y ago
      Who said anything about a technical problem? Being an “admin on their phone” just means knowing their PIN code and passwords and grabbing their phone whenever you want. No technical know-how required. Also, I object to this: > They're already trying to ensure their children are fed, educated, socialized, emotionally supported, and so on. In 2024, all of the above except “fed” occur at least partially over the Internet. Ignoring your child’s time spent online is like being the oblivious parents in an urban fantasy story who don’t realize their kids are slipping off to have adventures in the fae realm every night.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        This: > The parents can just be the admins of their children's devices and tell those devices to capture and report communications before they're encrypted. requires more technical skill than: > Who said anything about a technical problem? Being an “admin on their phone” just means knowing their PIN code and passwords and grabbing their phone whenever you want. No technical know-how required. I don't even know how to get them to "capture and report communications before they're encrypted" (generically over all apps and websites), and I've been writing iPhone apps since iOS 4 and the first retina iPod touch.
- abc123abc123 2y ago
  Do you think pedos don't read the news? Of course, if privacy is dismantled by law, they will move to other platforms. They are not stupid. The ones who suffer will be dissidents, political opponents, people who do victimless crimes, regular people where the scanners scanned wrong etc. All it would take is for one socialist or fascist to come into power, and our dear politicians will have created the perfect platform for imprisoning dissidents. This discussion is short sighted, naive, and so forgetful of history and the benefits of privacy that I really truly have come to believe that politicians at large are the retards they appear to be.
  - lukan 2y ago
    "They are not stupid." Some are, those are caught. But those who are not, learned to be very sneaky. They have to hide their dark side ALL the time. That is a pretty intense training in terms of operational security. And the solution to this is probably not technical, but social. People could get to know their neighbors more. My experience with those guys is, it still shows, if you pay attention. But if you are sure your neighbor is not a pedo, then it is one more person you can trust to keep a lookout for the dangerous types. You know, classic community building stuff.
    - lynx23 2y ago
      Yay, Neighborhood Watch! Wannabie police harrassing citizens, thats just what we all need!
      - lukan 2y ago
        Well, if a community is working well and everyone knows and supports each other, then there is no need for police. The crazy ones simply get early help. But the way things develope, neighborhood watches will likely be more and more common. (pedos are just one motivator)
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- vaylian 2y ago
  > it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communication with whoever they are talking to is end-to-end encrypted. This is not purely a technical matter. Children and adolescents want confidential communication just like older people. You might argue, that it is in the best interest of minors to have someone/something look at their private communication to intervene if necessary, but there are much better and more versatile ways to protect the children: Educate them and their parents. Children need to learn how to manage trust with strangers in the offline and online world anyway and the internet doesn't change that. In fact, sexual abuse usually has an offline component to it that you can only effectively protect against by educating children.
  - xzjis 2y ago
    >there are much better and more versatile ways to protect the children: Educate them and their parents. That's exactly it, we should address the root cause of the problem, not its consequences by punishing and threatening to be punished. It's much more effective.
  - newswasboring 2y ago
    > Educate them and their parents. Children need to learn how to manage trust with strangers in the offline and online world anyway and the internet doesn't change that. I'm not sure this is even possible. I understand children are smart but I don't think they are this smart. We can educate children to be cautious but i don't think we should expect them not to get out witted by an adult.
    - vaylian 2y ago
      Children are smart enough to understand that no stranger except for a doctor should request to see their private parts. Children are smart enough to learn that they should not respond to sharing names, ages and locations when asked about it on the internet. Also: Children are a lot smarter than AI, which is allegedly the super-magical protection against child grooming.
      - 2y ago
- wadim 2y ago
  Didn't we have quite a few scandals involving LE saving and sharing media as well? Doesn't make it much better, you'll just have a bigger pool of people looking at the unencrypted chats. I think a better solution would be filters which run only locally and can block problematic messages, as well as alarm platform provider/LE/parents. E2E still works, but you have some safety as well.
  - Xelbair 2y ago
    Who decides what's problematic message or not?
- abofh 2y ago
  It is 100% the parents responsibility to have an active enough role in their Child's life to know who they're interacting with and to provide appropriate supervision. If your child is getting addicted to something, it's because they've been enabled, perhaps through their friends devices or what have you. You cannot push the burden of being a responsible parent on people who do not wish to be your childrens parent. Society owes you places they can go that they are safe, not padded walls on every sharp corner they might bump into -- that's baby proofing, and it has to be done at home.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    The entire point of being a teenager is to get away from your parents and find new peer groups. Unfortunately, what we evolved for is 160 people in a village with a peer group of about a dozen within a few years of us, not even a school with hundreds to thousands, let alone the internet with two people for every heartbeat in a human lifetime of which 440 million (~= the population of the EU) is within a few years of us. And given the power imbalance between manipulative corporations and normal people is sufficient for the former to convince the latter to watch adverts while conversing with their friends — the entirety of Facebook's business model — it's not even clear to me that the internet in its current state is a good thing for adults either: to many of these companies, even the ones that are legal rather than criminal scams, we are the trees upon which money grows.
    - abofh 2y ago
      Once we're at teenagers, then it's still - did you raise them to be aware of the world around them? Did you give them the tools to evaluate safe and unsafe online activity? A kid doesn't accidentally end up addicted heroin unless they have exposure to heroin. Child grooming predates encryption and the internet and relied primarily on trusted people convincing children not to talk. No amount of decrypted internet traffic will protect your children from unsupervised in-person access by strangers - worrying about what they do online as a black box of whataboutism -- and again, it's the parents, not society as a whole who has that responsibility. Are there evil people? Yes. Are there corporations that are interested in you being addicted to their products (Oxy, Alcohol, Nicotine, Meta) -- yes. Do you need the right to inspect what I send to my wife to protect your children? No. I'm sorry that teenagers are hard, they always have been - that's a hard part about parenting. The hardest part though is that you raised them to make their own choices - and this is the final exam -- did your kids make good choices. You don't get to put that responsibility on anyone else, you raised them, you gave them the tools - and at some point, they will make a choice without you. If you believe the only way for them to make a good choice is to be able to surveil every aspect of their lives, then I hate to tell you what will happen when they stop being children.
- js8 2y ago
  I don't follow your argument in the last paragraph. What has the fact that children get addicted to social networks to do with the encrypted, peer-to-peer communication? It seems to me like they are two different things. While I agree it might be healthy for children to avoid social networks (its addictive features, like algorithmic feeds), I don't think it's healthy for them to avoid any Internet communication. That's how humans are gonna do things in the future, you plug-in yourself to the collective consciousness, unmediated instant communication with many, many people (of your own choice). It's a positive thing, and children need to learn how to operate in that environment. Forbidding them from communicating (for fear of predators) is backwards. It's like forbidding computers to kids because there are violent video games.
- axegon_ 2y ago
  Not a whole lot to discuss here, I fully agree. This goes beyond children's safety and into general privacy(which the vast majority of people are totally clueless about, contrary to their beliefs): no amount of encryption can compensate for bad privacy habits. People tend to think that the bottomless pit that is the internet and the billions of users will keep them hidden, which couldn't be further from the truth. And speaking of the truth, all people are surprisingly unique in their own way and there is no such thing as "average". I've been fiddling with this idea for a while and I am putting it to the test in my spare time and so far the results are astonishing: it's far easier to doxx someone online as a consequence of a personal fact that they've publicly shared than some data leak by a private company or even a government institution. Leaks make matters worse, sure but the pile grows exponentially and not linearly(which seems to be what most assume): People get freaked out about their number being posted somewhere online while not realizing that by saying something along the lines of "I studied in London in the early 2010's, then in Edinburgh until 2015" and "I lived in Paris between 2017 and 2019" and someone wants to find their identity, they've willingly helped them narrow down the identity to a handful of people - likely in the very low double digits. Add one more random fact, such as "I have a Volvo xc 70" and you've basically put a pin on yourself on the map. Most people have probably never considered this. It may sound like a cliche but it's far more important to educate people as well as their children from a very early age about those things than to assume that outsourcing the problem to technical solutions would somehow solve it - it won't.
- EMIRELADERO 2y ago
  > Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communication with whoever they are talking to is end-to-end encrypted. How can you do this without compromising anonymity? The inevitable conclusion of this argument is that an ID check will be mandatory in order to enable E2EE messaging, otherwise any child could be instructed to enable it by a bad actor.
- deletein72h 2y ago
  > who dedicate huge teams of highly paid people to ensuring children get addicted to their platforms one word: corruption. there's no solution for it because it's a matter of character. now I've spent quite some time in school and university with people who now work for criminal police, police, governments, media, and I know that some of them, if not most, shouldn't be trusted withe safety of other peoples' children. and i also know that some of them absolutely will sell data collected through scanning children's messages and I also know that there's plenty of people in psychology, again, I know some, who would absolutely use said data for therapeutic experiments, marketing campaigns, and so on just to see what can be done with people. this shit has been going for decades in different segments of the population. so we absolutely must establish strong encryption practices wherever we can, especially for children, who's future is still in development, who are learning to be productive and constructive, however long it may take. even more data points for those who already fucked up with what they collected in the past is a bad idea and it's not a matter of competence, these guys are good, it's a matter of character, these guys need to tend to different desires, but they have been "set up" to be what they are now and they are spreading and applying that shit more and more systematically now.
- thefz 2y ago
  > Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications Assuming the scan always happen by a well-intentioned actor, and that no data is ever leaked, and that the children consent to the scanning... lots of assumptions here. ANY human communication has the right to be private. Imagine a proposal to install microphones on kids to record anything they say just in case. It would be outrageous, right? We focus on electronic communications just because if we want, we can break their privacy.
- devwastaken 2y ago
  In the U.S anyone under 18 have been and can easily be prosecuted and entered into the widely abused sex offender registry for not just other minors, but themselves. The law is designed to be strict in a world where teens are breaking it constantly. Puritan cultures like this are not hard to find, and act solely to punish people and abuse government authority.
- salawat 2y ago
  >I don't think it's reasonable to make this the parent's responsibility, when basically the whole world is internet connected... I think it is, tbqh. It's a tool. They have to be taught to wield it responsibly. >fighting against multi-billion dollar international corporations, who dedicate huge teams of highly paid people to ensuring children get addicted to their platforms. I dare say... I see the problem here, and it isn't one scanning everyone's communications is an effective mitigation for.
- squigz 2y ago
  > Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem I'm happy to see strong evidence on this.
egberts1 2y ago
You cannot say flat-out say that E2E alone must be maintained, you must make it harder for others to reach you, thru something done in-person/screen-only QR-code, Bluetooth'd contact vCard, ..., something that prevents drive-by spammers/perps/malicious actors from randomly attaching to an account. The key thing is to make distribution of account name harder: 1. Send 256-char hash of your account 2. They tag your hash with a name of their own choice Disassociative of name to account gets maintained when used with a Signal protocol, which is what Signal app can do. Again, weak sauce on claiming E2E is alone essential for child's privacy.
- bboygravity 2y ago
  How do you know what's running on Signal's server? Sidenote: Signal is based in the USA. They do not have the benefit of the doubt.
  - egberts1 2y ago
    You have association revealed openly to anyone having access to Signal server by User ID but barely know the name or phone associated with either end, much less ever able to see any actual and readable message content. Unless it is the end-device being "accessed"/compromised, which any nation-state can do.
    - bboygravity 2y ago
      Why would it be impossible for Signal to decrypt and re-encrypt on their server while pretending to be "peer 2 peer encrypted" if we don't know what's running on their server? What's more: we don't even have the source of the client binary running on our phone. Also "which any nation-state can do" is an interesting angle. Let me put that differently: why would Signal NOT be a honey-pot operated by the CIA/NSA/other? Sounds almost too easy to not be true.
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    You and GP bring signal into this, but TFA is hosted on simplex.chat blog - the communicator famous for not having user accounts at all, so it trivially fixed the problem GP mentioned.
teekert 2y ago
I find the argument a bit weak because client side scanning is not the same as creating a central store for all send images. I do indeed find it very concerning that flagged content will eventually be looked at by a human, and said human may be a criminal, or said human and her computers will indeed be the target of hackers looking to extort. Would be nice if this scenario would first play out for a politician that helped establish Chat Control.
- xzjis 2y ago
  > Would be nice if this scenario would first play out for a politician that helped establish Chat Control. Unfortunately French politicians already thought about it, and politicians will be exempted from Chat Control.
TrackerFF 2y ago
Not related to encryption, but "child safety" seems to be a really popular subject for ushering in all kinds of overreaching policies. Encrypted communications? Think of the children. Legalizing cannabis? Think of the children. LGBTQ+ rights? Think of the children. Non-western immigrants? Think of the children. Non-western social media becoming too popular? Think of the children. etc. Sorry if this was political, but every time I see someone use "Think of the children" as their main argument, I can't help but to think there's some ulterior motives, and kids (who can't voice their opinion, or won't be heard / taken seriously if they could) are just being used as pawns - because who would want to argue against the safety of kids?
- brnt 2y ago
  > Not related to encryption, but "child safety" seems to be a really popular subject for ushering in all kinds of overreaching policies. Approximately the same age as pretending everything is a slippery slope the other way. Who knew: extremists are evergreen and forever doomed to not be reasonable by definition.
- abc123abc123 2y ago
  Nothing new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp... We quickly forget our history.
- concordDance 2y ago
  Amusingly, for every single political example you gave, I've heard "think of the children" from both directions.
  - squigz 2y ago
    Can you elaborate? Can't say I've ever heard someone say we should legalize cannabis so the kids can smoke it too.
    - concordDance 2y ago
Taniwha 2y ago
Really - today in NZ we have a political stoush where a serving politician has been chatting with young teenagers on snapchat - while there are lots of places where perfect security is important, with predatory adults around perhaps it's not the solution for protecting kids
andrewstuart 2y ago
Please, not the "we're protecting the children". It always starts with "we're protecting the children". It always ends with "we're censoring the Internet".
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

116 points by Sami_Lehtinen 2y ago

I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but I don't buy that end-to-end encryption will, overall, increase children's safety. I'm happy to see strong evidence one way of the other, but this article is very one-sided. Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communication with whoever they are talking to is end-to-end encrypted. I don't think it's reasonable to make this the parent's responsibility, when basically the whole world is internet connected, and those parents are fighting against multi-billion dollar international corporations, who dedicate huge teams of highly paid people to ensuring children get addicted to their platforms. Looking at the children in my life, it's very hard to keep them off social media, even if you don't give them devices they will just use their friend's, or devices at school.

epoberezkin 2y ago
You should understand that you cannot have the cake and eat it. The logic here is very simple: 1) Any scanning messages of children and their parents means providing access to them, effectively removing the protection provided by the encryption. 2) If these messages are accessible to any algorithm or systems, however secure, there is no way to guarantee that the bad actors will be prevented from accessing these messages - it's only the question of time until this information is leaked. 3) If these messages are accessible to bad actors, it will enable more grooming - because they will be used to train language models to more effectively manipulate children and other people. So while politicians can engage in their wishful and magical thinking about some wonderful technology that will allow, what they call, a "lawful access" but at the same time will somehow prevent unlawful access by bad actors, everybody with a bit of technical knowledge understands that it is simply impossible - it's either e2e encrypted and nobody other than the communicating parties can access it, or it is not - and then anybody with resources can access it, including bad actors. That's why they want to scan messages of everybody other than themselves: https://www.eureporter.co/business/data/mass-surveillance-data/2024/04/15/leak-eu-interior-ministers-want-to-exempt-themselves-from-chat-control-bulk-scanning-of-private-messages/ https://www.eureporter.co/business/data/mass-surveillance-da... It was never about protecting children - it is simply about eradicating the privacy as we know it, and preventing any dissent from being formed, and criminalising private conversations in the same way free speech is being criminalised. These ideas are not new - it's just now that they try to weaponise "let's protect the children" narrative to achieve it. The only way to protect children and vulnerable people online is to reduce their discoverability on online platforms, not to expose their communications to enable more efficient grooming - which would be the effect of the scanning.
_cenw 2y ago
Most of the abuse already happens on "responsible" platforms that provide zero expectation of privacy, like Discord. Scanners are just not good at finding anyone but second-degree consumers, and that seems to happen more on web forums (and also, focusing attention here doesn't get rid of producers).
gherkinnn 2y ago
> those parents are fighting against multi-billion dollar international corporations, who dedicate huge teams of highly paid people to ensuring children get addicted to their platforms So why not put a stop to this then? With any luck we'll come to realise that these platforms and the people working on them are the same scum that run the tobacco industry.
- CJefferson 2y ago
  I completely agree with you, we will look back on the big social media companies exactly the same way we look at big tobacco, they knew all along the damage they were causing, and spent heroic efforts covering it up to make profits.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
It could done though, via in channel-system- analysing communication, communicating to parties outside the black box, without monitoring the conversation otherwise. If the NNaNNy detects inapropriate conversations by parties underage, it calls the police.
derefr 2y ago
Why does scanning of children's communications need to involve non-E2E-encrypted communication? The parents can just be the admins of their children's devices and tell those devices to capture and report communications before they're encrypted.
- Arainach 2y ago
  Putting aside that children as a group are brilliant and constantly jailbreaking every kind of device management they are subjected to, the vast majority of parents aren't technical enough to understand this problem much less set themselves up as "admins" and the vast majority of those who are technical enough to understand do not have the time. They're already trying to ensure their children are fed, educated, socialized, emotionally supported, and so on. This is a wonderful example of engineers thinking everything is a technical problem when almost everything is instead an organizational or human problem.
  - derefr 2y ago
    Who said anything about a technical problem? Being an “admin on their phone” just means knowing their PIN code and passwords and grabbing their phone whenever you want. No technical know-how required. Also, I object to this: > They're already trying to ensure their children are fed, educated, socialized, emotionally supported, and so on. In 2024, all of the above except “fed” occur at least partially over the Internet. Ignoring your child’s time spent online is like being the oblivious parents in an urban fantasy story who don’t realize their kids are slipping off to have adventures in the fae realm every night.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      This: > The parents can just be the admins of their children's devices and tell those devices to capture and report communications before they're encrypted. requires more technical skill than: > Who said anything about a technical problem? Being an “admin on their phone” just means knowing their PIN code and passwords and grabbing their phone whenever you want. No technical know-how required. I don't even know how to get them to "capture and report communications before they're encrypted" (generically over all apps and websites), and I've been writing iPhone apps since iOS 4 and the first retina iPod touch.
abc123abc123 2y ago
Do you think pedos don't read the news? Of course, if privacy is dismantled by law, they will move to other platforms. They are not stupid. The ones who suffer will be dissidents, political opponents, people who do victimless crimes, regular people where the scanners scanned wrong etc. All it would take is for one socialist or fascist to come into power, and our dear politicians will have created the perfect platform for imprisoning dissidents. This discussion is short sighted, naive, and so forgetful of history and the benefits of privacy that I really truly have come to believe that politicians at large are the retards they appear to be.
- lukan 2y ago
  "They are not stupid." Some are, those are caught. But those who are not, learned to be very sneaky. They have to hide their dark side ALL the time. That is a pretty intense training in terms of operational security. And the solution to this is probably not technical, but social. People could get to know their neighbors more. My experience with those guys is, it still shows, if you pay attention. But if you are sure your neighbor is not a pedo, then it is one more person you can trust to keep a lookout for the dangerous types. You know, classic community building stuff.
  - lynx23 2y ago
    Yay, Neighborhood Watch! Wannabie police harrassing citizens, thats just what we all need!
    - lukan 2y ago
      Well, if a community is working well and everyone knows and supports each other, then there is no need for police. The crazy ones simply get early help. But the way things develope, neighborhood watches will likely be more and more common. (pedos are just one motivator)
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
vaylian 2y ago
> it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communication with whoever they are talking to is end-to-end encrypted. This is not purely a technical matter. Children and adolescents want confidential communication just like older people. You might argue, that it is in the best interest of minors to have someone/something look at their private communication to intervene if necessary, but there are much better and more versatile ways to protect the children: Educate them and their parents. Children need to learn how to manage trust with strangers in the offline and online world anyway and the internet doesn't change that. In fact, sexual abuse usually has an offline component to it that you can only effectively protect against by educating children.
- xzjis 2y ago
  >there are much better and more versatile ways to protect the children: Educate them and their parents. That's exactly it, we should address the root cause of the problem, not its consequences by punishing and threatening to be punished. It's much more effective.
- newswasboring 2y ago
  > Educate them and their parents. Children need to learn how to manage trust with strangers in the offline and online world anyway and the internet doesn't change that. I'm not sure this is even possible. I understand children are smart but I don't think they are this smart. We can educate children to be cautious but i don't think we should expect them not to get out witted by an adult.
  - vaylian 2y ago
    Children are smart enough to understand that no stranger except for a doctor should request to see their private parts. Children are smart enough to learn that they should not respond to sharing names, ages and locations when asked about it on the internet. Also: Children are a lot smarter than AI, which is allegedly the super-magical protection against child grooming.
    - 2y ago
wadim 2y ago
Didn't we have quite a few scandals involving LE saving and sharing media as well? Doesn't make it much better, you'll just have a bigger pool of people looking at the unencrypted chats. I think a better solution would be filters which run only locally and can block problematic messages, as well as alarm platform provider/LE/parents. E2E still works, but you have some safety as well.
- Xelbair 2y ago
  Who decides what's problematic message or not?
abofh 2y ago
It is 100% the parents responsibility to have an active enough role in their Child's life to know who they're interacting with and to provide appropriate supervision. If your child is getting addicted to something, it's because they've been enabled, perhaps through their friends devices or what have you. You cannot push the burden of being a responsible parent on people who do not wish to be your childrens parent. Society owes you places they can go that they are safe, not padded walls on every sharp corner they might bump into -- that's baby proofing, and it has to be done at home.
- ben_w 2y ago
  The entire point of being a teenager is to get away from your parents and find new peer groups. Unfortunately, what we evolved for is 160 people in a village with a peer group of about a dozen within a few years of us, not even a school with hundreds to thousands, let alone the internet with two people for every heartbeat in a human lifetime of which 440 million (~= the population of the EU) is within a few years of us. And given the power imbalance between manipulative corporations and normal people is sufficient for the former to convince the latter to watch adverts while conversing with their friends — the entirety of Facebook's business model — it's not even clear to me that the internet in its current state is a good thing for adults either: to many of these companies, even the ones that are legal rather than criminal scams, we are the trees upon which money grows.
  - abofh 2y ago
    Once we're at teenagers, then it's still - did you raise them to be aware of the world around them? Did you give them the tools to evaluate safe and unsafe online activity? A kid doesn't accidentally end up addicted heroin unless they have exposure to heroin. Child grooming predates encryption and the internet and relied primarily on trusted people convincing children not to talk. No amount of decrypted internet traffic will protect your children from unsupervised in-person access by strangers - worrying about what they do online as a black box of whataboutism -- and again, it's the parents, not society as a whole who has that responsibility. Are there evil people? Yes. Are there corporations that are interested in you being addicted to their products (Oxy, Alcohol, Nicotine, Meta) -- yes. Do you need the right to inspect what I send to my wife to protect your children? No. I'm sorry that teenagers are hard, they always have been - that's a hard part about parenting. The hardest part though is that you raised them to make their own choices - and this is the final exam -- did your kids make good choices. You don't get to put that responsibility on anyone else, you raised them, you gave them the tools - and at some point, they will make a choice without you. If you believe the only way for them to make a good choice is to be able to surveil every aspect of their lives, then I hate to tell you what will happen when they stop being children.
js8 2y ago
I don't follow your argument in the last paragraph. What has the fact that children get addicted to social networks to do with the encrypted, peer-to-peer communication? It seems to me like they are two different things. While I agree it might be healthy for children to avoid social networks (its addictive features, like algorithmic feeds), I don't think it's healthy for them to avoid any Internet communication. That's how humans are gonna do things in the future, you plug-in yourself to the collective consciousness, unmediated instant communication with many, many people (of your own choice). It's a positive thing, and children need to learn how to operate in that environment. Forbidding them from communicating (for fear of predators) is backwards. It's like forbidding computers to kids because there are violent video games.
axegon_ 2y ago
Not a whole lot to discuss here, I fully agree. This goes beyond children's safety and into general privacy(which the vast majority of people are totally clueless about, contrary to their beliefs): no amount of encryption can compensate for bad privacy habits. People tend to think that the bottomless pit that is the internet and the billions of users will keep them hidden, which couldn't be further from the truth. And speaking of the truth, all people are surprisingly unique in their own way and there is no such thing as "average". I've been fiddling with this idea for a while and I am putting it to the test in my spare time and so far the results are astonishing: it's far easier to doxx someone online as a consequence of a personal fact that they've publicly shared than some data leak by a private company or even a government institution. Leaks make matters worse, sure but the pile grows exponentially and not linearly(which seems to be what most assume): People get freaked out about their number being posted somewhere online while not realizing that by saying something along the lines of "I studied in London in the early 2010's, then in Edinburgh until 2015" and "I lived in Paris between 2017 and 2019" and someone wants to find their identity, they've willingly helped them narrow down the identity to a handful of people - likely in the very low double digits. Add one more random fact, such as "I have a Volvo xc 70" and you've basically put a pin on yourself on the map. Most people have probably never considered this. It may sound like a cliche but it's far more important to educate people as well as their children from a very early age about those things than to assume that outsourcing the problem to technical solutions would somehow solve it - it won't.
EMIRELADERO 2y ago
> Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communication with whoever they are talking to is end-to-end encrypted. How can you do this without compromising anonymity? The inevitable conclusion of this argument is that an ID check will be mandatory in order to enable E2EE messaging, otherwise any child could be instructed to enable it by a bad actor.
deletein72h 2y ago
> who dedicate huge teams of highly paid people to ensuring children get addicted to their platforms one word: corruption. there's no solution for it because it's a matter of character. now I've spent quite some time in school and university with people who now work for criminal police, police, governments, media, and I know that some of them, if not most, shouldn't be trusted withe safety of other peoples' children. and i also know that some of them absolutely will sell data collected through scanning children's messages and I also know that there's plenty of people in psychology, again, I know some, who would absolutely use said data for therapeutic experiments, marketing campaigns, and so on just to see what can be done with people. this shit has been going for decades in different segments of the population. so we absolutely must establish strong encryption practices wherever we can, especially for children, who's future is still in development, who are learning to be productive and constructive, however long it may take. even more data points for those who already fucked up with what they collected in the past is a bad idea and it's not a matter of competence, these guys are good, it's a matter of character, these guys need to tend to different desires, but they have been "set up" to be what they are now and they are spreading and applying that shit more and more systematically now.
thefz 2y ago
> Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications Assuming the scan always happen by a well-intentioned actor, and that no data is ever leaked, and that the children consent to the scanning... lots of assumptions here. ANY human communication has the right to be private. Imagine a proposal to install microphones on kids to record anything they say just in case. It would be outrageous, right? We focus on electronic communications just because if we want, we can break their privacy.
devwastaken 2y ago
In the U.S anyone under 18 have been and can easily be prosecuted and entered into the widely abused sex offender registry for not just other minors, but themselves. The law is designed to be strict in a world where teens are breaking it constantly. Puritan cultures like this are not hard to find, and act solely to punish people and abuse government authority.
salawat 2y ago
>I don't think it's reasonable to make this the parent's responsibility, when basically the whole world is internet connected... I think it is, tbqh. It's a tool. They have to be taught to wield it responsibly. >fighting against multi-billion dollar international corporations, who dedicate huge teams of highly paid people to ensuring children get addicted to their platforms. I dare say... I see the problem here, and it isn't one scanning everyone's communications is an effective mitigation for.
squigz 2y ago
> Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem I'm happy to see strong evidence on this.

egberts1 2y ago

You cannot say flat-out say that E2E alone must be maintained, you must make it harder for others to reach you, thru something done in-person/screen-only QR-code, Bluetooth'd contact vCard, ..., something that prevents drive-by spammers/perps/malicious actors from randomly attaching to an account. The key thing is to make distribution of account name harder: 1. Send 256-char hash of your account 2. They tag your hash with a name of their own choice Disassociative of name to account gets maintained when used with a Signal protocol, which is what Signal app can do. Again, weak sauce on claiming E2E is alone essential for child's privacy.

bboygravity 2y ago
How do you know what's running on Signal's server? Sidenote: Signal is based in the USA. They do not have the benefit of the doubt.
- egberts1 2y ago
  You have association revealed openly to anyone having access to Signal server by User ID but barely know the name or phone associated with either end, much less ever able to see any actual and readable message content. Unless it is the end-device being "accessed"/compromised, which any nation-state can do.
  - bboygravity 2y ago
    Why would it be impossible for Signal to decrypt and re-encrypt on their server while pretending to be "peer 2 peer encrypted" if we don't know what's running on their server? What's more: we don't even have the source of the client binary running on our phone. Also "which any nation-state can do" is an interesting angle. Let me put that differently: why would Signal NOT be a honey-pot operated by the CIA/NSA/other? Sounds almost too easy to not be true.
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  You and GP bring signal into this, but TFA is hosted on simplex.chat blog - the communicator famous for not having user accounts at all, so it trivially fixed the problem GP mentioned.

teekert 2y ago

I find the argument a bit weak because client side scanning is not the same as creating a central store for all send images. I do indeed find it very concerning that flagged content will eventually be looked at by a human, and said human may be a criminal, or said human and her computers will indeed be the target of hackers looking to extort. Would be nice if this scenario would first play out for a politician that helped establish Chat Control.

xzjis 2y ago
> Would be nice if this scenario would first play out for a politician that helped establish Chat Control. Unfortunately French politicians already thought about it, and politicians will be exempted from Chat Control.

TrackerFF 2y ago

Not related to encryption, but "child safety" seems to be a really popular subject for ushering in all kinds of overreaching policies. Encrypted communications? Think of the children. Legalizing cannabis? Think of the children. LGBTQ+ rights? Think of the children. Non-western immigrants? Think of the children. Non-western social media becoming too popular? Think of the children. etc. Sorry if this was political, but every time I see someone use "Think of the children" as their main argument, I can't help but to think there's some ulterior motives, and kids (who can't voice their opinion, or won't be heard / taken seriously if they could) are just being used as pawns - because who would want to argue against the safety of kids?

brnt 2y ago
> Not related to encryption, but "child safety" seems to be a really popular subject for ushering in all kinds of overreaching policies. Approximately the same age as pretending everything is a slippery slope the other way. Who knew: extremists are evergreen and forever doomed to not be reasonable by definition.
abc123abc123 2y ago
Nothing new. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp... We quickly forget our history.
concordDance 2y ago
Amusingly, for every single political example you gave, I've heard "think of the children" from both directions.
- squigz 2y ago
  Can you elaborate? Can't say I've ever heard someone say we should legalize cannabis so the kids can smoke it too.
  - concordDance 2y ago

Taniwha 2y ago

Really - today in NZ we have a political stoush where a serving politician has been chatting with young teenagers on snapchat - while there are lots of places where perfect security is important, with predatory adults around perhaps it's not the solution for protecting kids

andrewstuart 2y ago

Please, not the "we're protecting the children". It always starts with "we're protecting the children". It always ends with "we're censoring the Internet".

deleted 2y ago

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