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GDPR meant nothing: chat control ends privacy for the EU [video]
- globalnode 1y agoNudge the door open with child abuse "concern" and then expand to your hearts content later. The analogy of it being like a police officer standing next to you while you chat online to a friend was great. He was joking when he said "lets cancel cars" but it might happen in the distant future. Letting people control heavy projectiles doesnt seem like such a great idea.
- latentsea 1y agoWhen you put "concern" in scare quotes like that... are you saying that there isn't actually anything to be concerned about regarding the safety of children using the internet?
- pqtyw 1y agoPerhaps? But that seems mostly tangential to this specific issue? I mean it's like trying to solve income inequality with by adopting Bolshevist communism...
- globalnode 1y agoof course its concerning, but i doubt its the ultimate objective and it also seems contrived given the other dangers to children that abound.
- latentsea 1y agoI guess you're right. I doubt there are actually any children being prayed on on streaming apps and the like, and even if there are I highly doubt it has any lasting impact on their mental health.
- roer 1y agoThe problem is obviously real, but a lot of people disagree with this proposed solution. Nobody is trying to argue whether child abuse is a problem or not.
- latentsea 1y agoI don't think there's a workable solution that both protects kids and protects society from sliding into 1984. It essentially feels like a referendum on "should we just accept it?" It being whichever over those you think is the lesser over two evils. Figuring that out is an exercise left to the reader.
- irusensei 1y agoMaybe not let your kids unattended on the internet. Require default settings on vendor products to child protected mode, punish parent negligence while in parallel crawl the web for illegal content.
- globalnode 1y agoIts these sorts of straw men that keep the conversation going in the wrong direction.
- latentsea 1y agoStraw man? It happened to my niece on a streaming app. She was 11. It started out as innocently as "what's that shirt you're wearing? Can you show me?" and progressed from there. Straw man my ass. Edit: I'm against the mass surveillance and direction things trending in, but I think either way we are facing a significant negative externality whichever way we choose. Either there's real people suffering real harm, or we're getting screwed by sliding into 1984. Both of those horrible. If we pick one horrible over the other, we're essentially saying "I'm ok accepting this horrible reality in order to avoid a different horrible reality". I just don't think we can have our cake and eat it too on this issue.
- I_am_tiberius 1y agoIt's good to see there are still rational Americans.
- SanjayMehta 1y agoEuropean governments are all for free speech whilst imposing sanctions and invading other countries to export “democracy and human rights.” Fascinating to watch. (Downvoted, as expected. The hypocrisy on this site is absolutely adorable.)
- sMarsIntruder 1y agoIt's probably just one single guy scrolling through all the posts and downvoting covered in sweat. [Confirmed]
- FranzFerdiNaN 1y agoWhich countries have been invaded by European countries to bring democracy? Because America started multiple wars for that in the last 70 years, not Europe.
- closewith 1y agoIraq, Afghanistan, Mali, Somalia. The expeditionary European powers like the UK, Spain, etc can't hide behind the US when they were willing participants.
- reactordev 1y agosniff encrypted chats, hahaha. Some law makers are completely clueless. I like Louis Rossmann. He looks like he’s been up stressed for weeks, yet his arguments are pretty level headed.
- tokai 1y agoI wonder what the chances are that the ECJ could look at employing actions for annulment against chat control, if it is passed. It is possible for private individuals to ask the court to annul an EU act that directly concerns them. So even if governmental structures across EU does not want it challenged, the issue could still be brought to the court.
- ekianjo 1y agohas the ECJ ever done anything like that before?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tokai 1y agoYes all the time. Seems like there is a handful cases a year. Poland, as an example, has won 19 annulments between 2004–2023.
- bjelkeman-again 1y agoThe big one in 2020 I think was this one where they ruled against data retention. https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-10/cp200123en.pdf https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...
- ekianjo 1y agoLouis makes it sound that its actually for protecting the children but we all know its just an excuse for surveillance, control, and ultimately jailing people for wrong opinions (a real threat in the EU since there is no protection of Freedom of Speech anywhere)
- stefantalpalaru 1y ago[dead]
- Maken 1y agoThe European Convention of Human Rights explicitly protects freedom of expression.
- account42 1y agoIf it doesn't protect someone denying the holocaust then it won't protect any other expression that the government in power doesn't like.
- pqtyw 1y agoThe first amendment in the US did too but it took more than a 100 years for the current interpretation to become the consensus in the legal system.
- wmf 1y agoYeah but look how many exceptions there are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Convention_on_Human_Rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Con...
- ekianjo 1y agonope. part 2 of the article 10 basically nullifes the freedom of speech for any bs reason given by the government. that counts for nothing.
- FranzFerdiNaN 1y ago
- ljlolel 1y agoIsn’t EU’s justification that they protect you from companies / private industry but they want full government/police control because that’s trusted / socialist?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wmf 1y agoYes, privacy has worked that way for a long time. There's no gotcha here.
- closewith 1y agoThe EU is at its heart a neoliberal institution, not at all socialist.
- ljlolel 1y agoCapitalist doesn’t really fit with the gdpr. And anything but full trust of government also wouldn’t fit with chat control.
- closewith 1y ago> Capitalist doesn’t really fit with the gdpr. What makes you say that? A lot of it was heavily impacted by industry, who were by far the biggest contributors during the drafting process. > And anything but full trust of government also wouldn’t fit with chat control. I agree with this, but chat control isn't a top-down proposal. It's based on a solid grassroots movement aiming to combat CSAM. Personally I think it's misguided, but there is a _lot_ of public support for online regulation to stem the endless cases of CSAM. It's a real blind-spot of HN and devs to miss this, as if we don't find ways to effectively end CSAM online, stronger less-targeting regulation like the proposed Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse is inevitable>
- ljlolel 1y ago
- SilverElfin 1y agoStart with protecting children. Then something about misinformation. Then about defending democracy. Then about stopping terrorism. And soon you can escalate your authoritarian policy to just about anything. This is why having the structure of fundamental civil rights, like in the US constitution, is important. I’m surprised the EU doesn’t seem to have such protections for free speech and privacy and against warrantless surveillance.
- FpUser 1y ago>"Start with protecting children..." This is exactly what I think about it: https://youtu.be/J07wReeRF7Y?si=_VfrNiGRnG-_7dHX https://youtu.be/J07wReeRF7Y?si=_VfrNiGRnG-_7dHX
- tokai 1y agoBetween FISC, the Patriot Act/USA Freedom Act, and such it doesn't seem like the US constitution is doing a good job at protecting anyone. There is a long wikipedia article named Mass surveillance in the United States, but not yet one for the EU.
- dmix 1y agoFISA and patriot act are very controversial, the EU doing the same thing but far worse isn’t a good argument to stand on merely because the US gets talked about more on Wikipedia and therefore the press (which is one of the primary acceptable sources for a wiki article). Not to mention places like Germany and France did much of what NSA was doing back in the 2000s, often with even more leeway. If anything censorship and extensive government oversight of peoples lives in EU and UK is far less controversial so there isn’t much of a push back. As you can see every time this comes up on HN where people in the EU defend it.
- janalsncm 1y ago> FISA and patriot act are very controversial They are controversial with the public. They are not controversial within the government.
- II2II 1y ago[flagged]
- alfiedotwtf 1y ago> On the other hand, doing nothing hands over too much power to criminals What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty? Any form of blanket surveillance flips this into “maybe guilty so capture and archive surveillance data, and if ever (even years after) are possibly suspicious, comb through archived data to find some form of proof and then build up your pre-text for a warrant… in other words - “maybe guilty until proven guilty’
- wmf 1y agoWe've had end-to-end encryption for a few years now and there seem to be very few cases that have been thwarted by it. Criminals are actually dumb. (Yes, the FBI has 10,000 locked iPhones that they would love to unlock but it's not clear that it would make a difference.)
- em-bee 1y agodoing nothing hands over too much power to criminals you either have encryption, or you don't. there is no middle ground. any measure to force access to encrypted messages would effectively disable encryption entirely.
- callc 1y agoI was going to respond to this part of GP but along the lines of communication being (mostly?) not a crime in an of itself. Committing crimes in the physical world is still illegal. I just want to make that clear, governments don’t need complete access to your digital life to make the legal system go round. Unfortunately the argument of strong privacy for everyone loses compared to the emotional argument of “we could have prevented this horrific crime if we had access to XYZ”, in the emotional political arenas
- 6r17 1y ago> stirring up paranoia is not going to solve the problem There are reasonable tools that have been deployed and are existing for police enforcement ; notably with the coordination of ISP providers. The fact that encryption has been democratized does indeed change the situation for enforcement but this does not mean everybody should be spied on by default. Here's the thing, more appropriate tools for criminal activity encompass not only encryption but stenography technics, maybe even just signaling. It's so easy to bypass that it only steer up the problem an order of magnitude further, makes the life harder for everybody, and creates a situation where everybody's data is basically on some server. Now, knowing how capable institutions are able to protect data ; well i'm telling you there is 0 way I envision continuing my journey on the internet if it means that everything i look at, say or have an opinion on can be used against me eventually.
- Micheal17 1y ago[dead]
- OhioMan2943 1y agoLet me guess- preventing child abuse- unless it's done by an israeli government official of course https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/16/nevada-arrest-israeli-official https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/16/nevada-arres...
- zappb 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thraway993761 1y ago[dead]
- echelon 1y agoI hate the "protect the children" argument so much. Birth rates are so low that a lot of people don't even have kids. Why should we preference other people's children to a total invasion of our privacy? Shouldn't those parents mind their own offspring? Stop putting god and other people's children in my life. That's none of the government's business.
- wolvesechoes 1y ago> Stop putting god and other people's children in my life. That's none of the government's business This is very naive worldview.
- echelon 1y agoNo it's not. People need to leave other people alone. Stop imposing religion, lifestyle, judgment. Live and let live. What people do with their own lives is none of anybody else's business.
- VladVladikoff 1y agoIs it possible to make an encrypted messenger app without a central authority? Like BitTorrent magnet links. We all share the messages to support the network bandwidth, but can only see the messages which pertain to us? From my really novice understanding of cryptography, this should be possible. And it seems like the only privacy focused solution for the future. Edit: looks like it exists, and is called Briar.
- ta12653421 1y agoBitChat from Jack Dorsey
- lmz 1y agoIsn't that sort of like how Tor works?
- thaumasiotes 1y agoYou can send encrypted email. That's how email already works. You can also send encrypted messages over any other medium. You don't need the messenger app to encrypt your messages for you. One of the common arguments that PGP is bad is that it's "inevitable" that someone will send a message in cleartext, defeating the whole purpose of encrypting your messages. I don't understand this. The fact that this is possible to do is obviously an artifact of the idea that the user should be unable to tell whether the messages they send and receive are encrypted or not. Do the encryption and decryption yourself, and this is not a mistake it's possible to make. Don't confuse the encryption, which is something you do, with the delivery, which is something the channel does. The point of encryption is that the channel can't be trusted!
- frollogaston 1y agoRegular encrypted email relies on a certificate authority
- thaumasiotes 1y agoWhat?
- tonyhart7 1y agothat's what I am thinking, EU made GDPR that is good move prevent any third party to extract privacy data illegally but still doing it to themselves anyway like what's happening????
- jcdentonn 1y agoNobody is doing it. The law doesn't exist yet in the EU.
- eviks 1y agoAt least we got the cookies banners, that must count for something, right?
- WA 1y agoPlease stop repeating this nonsense. The GDPR never mentioned cookie banners. This is the industry‘s shitty solution to forcing users to consent with tracking. You can run a perfectly fine website with zero cookie banners if you simply don’t track your users and don’t expose them to third parties that do track them. Hence, all websites implementing cookie banners are the culprits here, not the GDPR.
- panstromek 1y agoIf the law incentivises bad behaviour, it's a bad law.
- tomgp 1y agothe behaviour was already bad (sharing your personal information with 1000s of “trusted partners”), companies just want to keep doing it even if it inconveniences their users.
- makeitdouble 1y agoIs your base assumption that putting up a cookie banner is worse than silently stalking users without permission ?
- bboygravity 1y agoAbsolutely yes. I can block coockies using simple addons, which is WAY lower effort than clicking through a deliberate dark-pattern that is different on EVERY website (or using complex addons with lookup tables for every website).
- Asraelite 1y ago
- wim 1y agoDrop the “chat” and just call it “control”. The current proposal is so vague it would cover anything with online sharing/syncing people can sign up for. Any SaaS, any app, any service. Chat, email, file syncing, todo lists, doesn’t matter.
- samuelhautamaki 1y agoNot only is the current proposal "vague", the current proposal also is most likely illegal. The EU courts already have ruled that legislation which weakens/breaks encryption goes against the EU fundamental rights.
- sunshine-o 1y agoI am pretty sure now that this ChatControl thing is the result of the EU being unable to setup an US type NSA/echelon type stealth mass surveillance system. They might have gone so far to have paid for an implementation but it didn't work (like the EU search engine, cloud or whatever) because they are really incompetent. So now the solution is to do it in the open, just write a dystopian law and force it through the fake parliament. Our only hope now is the practical implementation of ChatControl will also be in practice ineffective. We are not really living in 1984 or Brave New World, in the EU we are in the 1985 movie Brazil.
- pqtyw 1y agoDoes EU really have any real security apparatus independent from it's member states as such that it would really have a need for something like this? Also ChatControl is something being pushed by Denmark and other ideologically similar countries not necessarily the EU itself as such.
- 1oooqooq 1y agodictionary have wiretap. so just call it wireless tap.
- seydor 1y agoWhen left unchecked and unaccountable, regulators will grow to fill the volume of their container
- wuschel 1y agoWho are the actors behind the ChatControl initiative? I remember reading their names being blacked out.
- dariosalvi78 1y agoDanes and Swedes are in the forefront
- croes 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)
- thbb123 1y agoHow comes US celebrities have to create their foundation in Sweden instead of the US?
- lukan 1y ago"As of July 2013, Thorn is in talks with leading internet companies (Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Twitter and at least three others) to collaborate on creating a database of millions of child abuse images on the web." So if one messed up person likes that stuff, I guess they might aim towards working there?
- croes 1y agoWouldn‘t be the first time something like this happens
- PeterStuer 1y agoDSA was pushed by the very controversial Thierry Breton, former CEO of Atos, then European commissioner for the internal market, now on the advisory council of Bank of America. Atos btw is the company that leads in receiving money to construct Europe's virtual security infrastructure. But the proposal was ultimately supported by a substantial majority in parliament, led by the christians, socialists. liberals and greens. https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/139040 https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/139040
- dlcarrier 1y agoEU logic: Want to centrally track users with personally identifiably information? Great! Want to store anonymized data with local cookies, that the user can delete, disable, or doctor at any time? That should be heavily restricted with constant intrusive warnings.
- croes 1y agoThe GDPR isn’t about anonymized data stored in local cookies.
- dlcarrier 1y agoThat's not what it was all about, but it sure was an effect of it.
- throwawayqqq11 1y agoLocal governments all over the EU tried to push internet surveillance for a long time. Today, apparently the political landscale is ripe for their success. Considering the endurance and BS justifications they brought up for so long tells me, there is a is a coordinated effort behind the scenes going on for decades now. Dissmissing it with incompetence, like "EU logic" is naive, imo.
- bboygravity 1y agoI have the same opinion, but I can't think of who or what would be pushing for that? Unless it's just the US and NSA again actually somehow having trouble with bypassing encryption? Like just push the EU to do some more spying that the US/NSA can then use to see more? I find this somewhat hard to believe since in my mind the NSA is on every US server and can probably just get unencrypted everything from spyware (the OS itself) on all end-points. Maybe governments/humans simply eventually naturally pivot to power grabbing and this was going to happen all along everywhere? It's also not an EU-only thing. It's been happening all over the west, partners of the US and even outside of the west: UK, Australia, Colombia, Mexico, the Koreas, China, Russia, etc. Any other ideas?
- firefoxd 1y ago"What do you mean you and your friend chat over Signal when there are dozens of other chat apps? Sounds like you two have something to hide, if you ask me." [0] Whenever I hear someone telling me they have nothing to hide, I ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to me. The joke still goes over people heads sometimes. [0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/nothing-to-hide https://idiallo.com/blog/nothing-to-hide
- devn0ll 1y agoThese days I use the automated pricing of Uber, and groceries based on the person and/or time of day, what apps you have on your phone, etc as the reason why we DEFINITELY want more privacy. Without it, we are being manipulated because of all the stuff these parasites now know about us. All in the name of "enhancing the customer experience".. #puke
- jenadine 1y ago> Whenever I hear someone telling me they have nothing to hide, I ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to me. But I "trust" the gouvernement in a different way that I trust you. - With that access you can also "do" things, like sending messages or delete stuff. - I'm worried that you could judge me in a different way than the government would judge me. Because if you are a friend I care how you see me. But I don't care what the authorities think of me as long as I don't do anything illegal, they won't care. (Just playing devil's advocate here)
- whyever 1y ago> With that access you can also "do" things, like sending messages or delete stuff. If you break E2E encryption, you can likely also impersonate and "do" things.
- roenxi 1y agoAre you a lawyer? How confident are you that you aren't doing something illegal? At 30 seconds of thinking of an interesting example, there are still blasphemy laws on the books [0] in some parts of Europe and it isn't clear how compliant what people say at home is with hate speech laws. And there are a lot of laws out there that most people don't know about. There isn't any reason to think people are obeying the laws in the privacy of their own spaces. Historically there are actually good reasons to think people are disobeying the law, but the laws are stupid and it is better not to check unless there is a political opponent to take out (eg, anti-homosexuality regulations). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law
- dmantis 1y agoI tried I2P not so long ago and was quite impressed by the design decisions and the quality of the technology. It's truly an amazing piece of software that covers basically everything you need for a distributed network. The only thing missing is actually the community and usage, because the technology has a network effect, and more users with stable routers provide faster and a more reliable network. So it's indeed slow at the moment. I highly recommend giving it a chance and playing a bit with it. Even for non-anonymity and security cases, it's fun to play with hole punching, global addressing by public keys, and stuff like that, which you can see in things like Iroh and libp2p. It provides a simple universal SAM interface and libraries to work with it to plug other apps.
- kachapopopow 1y agoYou got me into i2p. My rpi router and dozens of servers are now i2p floodfill nodes!
- 1gn15 1y agoThanks!
- mannycalavera42 1y agohttps://geti2p.net/en/ https://geti2p.net/en/
- shiomiru 1y agoAnd if you don't want to install Java, there's also a C++ implementation: https://i2pd.website/ https://i2pd.website/
- sunshine-o 1y agoI have been hearing good things about I2P for 2 decades but what are the risks when using that thing? Is this like running a Tor node where you could potentially get a knock on the door because somebody else went on some pedo website?
- tiku 1y agoWhat if we make chats obfuscated instead of encrypted? So send a lot more data per sentence/word. It would need some sort of key on both sides to make sense of the data but it would be hard to use it without it. Or would that fall under the definition encryption?
- ck512 1y agoSecurity by obscurity is generally known to be ineffective; it's not an obstacle for even sightly dedicated thread-actors.
- wolvesechoes 1y agoHN discovers there is unsolvable tension between public, its interest and its institutions, Ep. 1234.
- xyzal 1y agoDoes anyone know where to find the text of the proposal? I wasn't able to find it.
- layer8 1y agohttps://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A2022%3A209%3AFIN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...
- re-lre-l 1y agoAnd what people in western, democratic world think about it? That this is just fine? I live in autocratic, almost dictatorship regime country and for the past 100 years we've just gotten used to the idea that we don't have any rules here. But I thought in EU and US things are different. All these news stories about Control, UK surveillance, age verification, all this stuff with no significant reaction baffle me.
- jchw 1y agoI live in the United States and it baffles me just as much, trust me. Fine, maybe I didn't have the biggest expectations for the general public, but I really expected the Internet to react much more viscerally to what is happening. In the past, the Internet was much more defensive about Internet policing that was significantly less dystopian. Now, it feels like no matter how rapidly things decline, it's just another Tuesday; most people are unwilling to make any sort of sacrifice or risk for any cause, and nobody (including me, I guess) is really sure what to do anyways. It really wasn't that long ago that we were all talking about SOPA.
- nip 1y agoA website was set up to inform and facilitate contacting MEPs: https://fightchatcontrol.eu https://fightchatcontrol.eu Additionally, keep in mind that controversial laws or proposals, at least in France, are often announced or passed during summer vacation when people are away, limiting scrutiny and attention. Expect to hear more outrage come September
- AnthonyMouse 1y agoThis is, ironically, one of the reasons we need a more decentralized public square. Large gatekeepers get flack from politicians if they allow "the wrong people" to organize. First they claim there is a huge problem with terrorists/nazis/pedos/etc., maybe even find a couple of real instances of those things, and use that to demand that the gatekeepers Do Something, i.e. set up a censorship apparatus. But the modern ones are subtle. You don't try to read something and get refused, it just goes to the bottom of the feed where you won't see it. Take advantage of the human failing that busybodies will take petty satisfaction in causing harm to strangers they've been told are their enemies. Let them issue false reports against anyone pointing out the emperor has no clothes. Have the algorithm take those reports seriously, with useless or non-existent customer service that can do nothing about adversarial report brigading. Make it known that this is what happens to people who don't toe the party line so people self-censor and people who don't get shadow banned. It's an assault on the ability of the public to defend itself from bad ideas. Large gatekeepers delenda est.
- upeiYaer 1y agoAre politicians really exempt? Must be some really high profile pedophiles, or pedophile supporters between them, like those in the Hungarian government - they support this by the way. Just one example from the many: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/17/europe/hungary-child-abuse-scandal-orban-family-values-europe-intl https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/17/europe/hungary-child-abus...
- sunshine-o 1y agoSure, Daniel Cohn Bendit, MEP for 20 years, was a big promoter of pedophilia [0]. Here he is on television promoting it in 1982 [1]. - [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Cohn-Bendit#Allegations_of_sex_with_minors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Cohn-Bendit#Allegations... - [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IOAaSFpVCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IOAaSFpVCw
- jakobnissen 1y agoIIUC, no, they are not excempt. Certain professional contexts are excempt from surveillance, including political work, police work, military work and some corporate work. This is intended to prevent state or corporate secrets to be subject to surveillance. I am not sure how it will be implemented that politicians are only excempt when texting about work. It seems like any implementation will allow politicians to avoid surveillance by using their work phone.
- Roark66 1y agoNo chance in hell my country agrees to it (despite the darling of EU being the current prime minister). It is still a minority government and both the president and the people oppose it. It will die this time and they will try to bring it back in 2 years time. One thing I do not understand is why people in Denmark allow this to happen. Where are the large scale protests against the party that brought this zombie back to life?
- irusensei 1y agoFollow the money. This and the sudden wave of internet censorship comes partly from AI companies lobbying trying to sell their new AI thing.
- tclover 1y ago[flagged]
- qwertox 1y agoAgain, again and again: These things should first be tested for 5 years on every politician and every civil servant, including their families, including their children. Security researches should be given the freedom to hack that system as much as they can, in order to find security problems, no prosecution guaranteed. Every access to data should be logged on a public blockchain with pseudonymization of who accessed whose data. After those 5 years, reports and statistical analysis about the usefulness should be published: how many crimes were prevented, who went to jail for what, who had to go to court for what, with references to the logged data in the blockchain. Then the public gets to vote on if they want this or not.
- cookiengineer 1y agoThe issue I have with this proposal is that politicians won't change their behavior. The optimum politician is an absolute pragmatist without any moral values. That is what you need to be to succeed in a federalistic democracy. Regarding Chat Control: Do we know who is lobbying for it so much? Maybe journalists should focus on finding dirt on the lobbying organizations, so that everyone knows about them.
- amarcheschi 1y agoTo be honest, the journalists already focused on finding dirt https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/ https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the... https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimited-data-access-in-online-child-sexual-abuse-regulation/ https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimite...
- input_sh 1y agoOh we know who's behind it: a Hollywood celebrity-run charity that shadily hired multiple high-ranking Europol politicians. Their whole deal is to convince legislators that scanning every image on your device for CSAM is absolutely necessary (https://www.thorn.org/ https://www.thorn.org/) and then selling a tool to do that to companies (https://safer.io/ https://safer.io/). If it's legally required, what else are you gonna do but go to them for a "solution"?
- AtNightWeCode 1y agoI voted for the only candidate that was clearly against this. However, the companies are suppose to do the scanning, not the police. Corporations like Meta already does things like this for sure. The difference is that they now will have to share potential crimes with the police. For Signal it is worse since it can't be added.
- throwaway290 1y agofor ages I was saying "do not ignore crime that is now allowed to scale and proliferate thanks to e2e" (very much similar to crypto). If you accept this reality and work with the government you can arrive at a decent compromise that is not 100% bad. If you ignore reality and cover your ears and shout "nananana", the government will find a way and I guarantee you it will be a dumb way that undermines privacy way more. News at 11, the government did. Let's pick our pitchforks up and pretend sexual abuse monetization or human trafficking are not taken to the next level thanks to end to end encryption. We gotta make police do their damn jobs right? It's not our fault we invent new and improved ways that prevent police from doing that.
- account42 1y agoIs the EU investigating the Epstein client list then?
- throwaway290 1y agoShow us the list?
- account42 1y agoYes, that's exactly something the EU could demand if they actually cared about protecting children.
- throwaway290 1y agoDemand from whom?
- moktonar 1y agoCan you hear that Mr.Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability..
- precommunicator 1y agoQuoting from proposed text: > When executing the detection order, providers should take all available safeguard measures to ensure that the technologies employed by them cannot be used by them or their employees for purposes other than compliance with this Regulation, nor by third parties, and thus to avoid undermining the security and confidentiality of the communications of users. EU demands impossible.
- silverliver 1y agoIsn't democracy rendered impossible with laws like this? I mean, if slavery was still legal or LGPT still illegal, would the government have been able to use this technology to smother political movements before they ever start? Wouldn't the government be able to add client-side scanning for words or phrases they don't like (not just images of child abuse)? For democracy to work at all, people must at least be able to freely discuss there contrarian thoughts amongst themselves, even if they run contrary to the ruling party's wishes. I did not expect the cradle of democracy to be the one to kill it.
- sunaookami 1y agoIt's already impossible thanks to the DSA.
- mnmalst 1y agoEvery single fucking day the whole world gets worse and worse. I am so sick and tired of this life.
- plnsut 1y agoThe result of all of the hubbub over privacy in past years is that many people left more centralized services for other private servers, which means that the government can no longer just ask Twitter for your data and it’s a pita for them. Once they can read everything again, and more, the next step will be to use your own network, a.k.a. the multinet, which is mostly an advanced form of the disparate networks in the 20th century. Even ARPANET was just another network, which evolved into the B.S. we have today. We also don’t have to use the same protocol stack, routing, etc. We could get rid of name resolution and just use some long IDs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lukeschlather 1y agoIf this has the effect its proponents claim it will, it seems like substantially the larger outcome of this will be that government agents will be reviewing people's sexts. They say that false positives are rare, but how often is it okay for the government to be reviewing peoples' sexts? I found it a little hard to get concrete info on how exactly their image hashes work, but it sounds quite literally that if you've got a couple of young people (whether teens or twentysomethings) who are sexting, and their sexts look a bit like some piece of "known CSAM" if you squint, then a government agent will review it and possibly harass them. Seems like eventually the law will get some poor girl killed when the authorities contact her parents about "CSAM," discover that it was the girl herself who took the picture and sent it to her boyfriend, her dad finds out she was having sex and does an honor killing. But we're just supposed to trust that these image hashes have a small false positive rate, when there's no way to have transparent review without making it easy for adversaries to avoid the scan.
- moi2388 1y agoEven if they have a small false positive rate, the absolute figures will be staggering. 500 million people and all texts are being scanned, with more than 99% not being CSAM.. you do the maths..
- cyb0rg1 1y ago[flagged]
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 1y agobut what if whatsapp refuses? majority of eu population rely on whatsapp for everyday life, they are going to revolt if whatsapp is pulled.
- cyb0rg1 1y agoEUSSR, an unvoted for central dystopian committee, led by WEF line Schwab, warmongers like Rutte and career aristocracy like Ausgeleiert (von der Leyen).