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It's not a technical problem. Chat Control wasn't about breaking encryption, it would bypass encryption with client-side scanning. It targets the apathetic 99%

It's not a technical problem. Chat Control wasn't about breaking encryption, it would bypass encryption with client-side scanning. It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it. It's also not a technical problem because technical solutions (like GPG) already exist. The problem is political (stopping these authoritarian laws) or should that fail, social (convincing people to inconvenience themselves with alternative communication apps that aren't available on app stores)

Gormo 1y ago
> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it. That's the same 99% of the population whose motivations and priorities define the incentive structures applicable to politics. If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight without quite a lot of leverage attached to entirely unrelated issues. So the choice is between creating impediments to the enforcement of this bad policy, and at minimum using technology to establish a frontier beyond which it can't reach -- one that is at least available to those motivated to seek it out -- or instead surrendering completely to politics controlling everything, with it being almost a certainty that the political process will be dominated by adverse interests.
- dns_snek 1y ago
  > If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy. We will need technical solutions to Chat Control of course, but that's just the last step. First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. An uncensored chat app is useless if we can't install it on our devices without government approval. Unfortunately a significant portion of the tech community is in favor of these walled ~~prisons~~ gardens. Anything we try to do is doomed to fail without freedom to do what we want with devices we own, so until we get past that hurdle I'm hopeless that we'll be able to do anything about Chat Control.
  - Gormo 1y ago
    > Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy. I'm not very hopeful about politics generally, for that very reason. The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes. > First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. Another political solution? Not going to happen. We need to work towards a functional mobile OS ecosystem that isn't controlled by Apple, Google, or the government. That won't be easy, and won't offer any immediate short-term options, but work is already in progress, and will in the long run be far more effective than waiting for politics to save us.
    - dns_snek 1y ago
      > Another political solution? Not going to happen. I hold out some hope that the EU "faction" responsible for the DMA makes enough progress in the coming years to make the lives of Chat Control proponents difficult by fighting for viability and complete independence of third party app stores. That's why I think it's critical for the EU to strike down Apple's (and now Google's) notarization process. I'd also invite those who support walled gardens and attack the EU for the DMA to rethink their position because if authoritarian legislation like Chat Control succeeds in the EU, it's definitely coming to the US next. Of course an independent OS would be the dream but I'm even less hopeful about that.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      Nobody has the resources like an Apple or a Google to develop an open mobile OS that will be able to run on any hardware
      - Gormo 1y ago
        If anything, I'd say it's the other way around. Apple and Google themselves don't seem to have the resources to do that -- iOS and Android are layers built on top of BSD and Linux, respectively -- whereas it's FOSS projects that are the most dominant and pervasive ones in even far more complex use cases than mobile OSes.
- pcrh 1y ago
  > If 99% of the population don't care about your issue... That depends largely on how the issue is presented. For example, it is now seen as "only sensible" to use pseudonyms online to protect your true identity from random people. Why does the same not apply to your other data? Why should the government have access to pictures of your children?
  - Gormo 1y ago
    Which is all well and good, and to the extent that people are won over to those arguments and create more political capital for putting an end to these privacy-violating policies, all for the better. But that's not a substitute for nor mutually exclusive with technical measures to protect privacy, which will work regardless of the political milieu.
mrguyorama 1y ago
> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it. It targets the 99% of the population who do not care about your absolutist stance on encryption, do not care about the technical reason you can't have simultaneous perfect encryption and a gov backdoor, and do not care about math. They care that the world changed pretty much overnight, and they are tired of finding out that their children have been solicited for sex by strangers on the internet and platforms have done everything possible to NOT address that problem. People are tired of being victimized, tired of not having some control over what their children are able to interact with, tired of being blamed for giving their kids access to the internet while their kids are required to use the internet for things like school It's utter insanity to think parents wouldn't rather just cede some freedom to have a fighting chance of bringing up children the way they want, of being able to keep them safe from literal pedophiles. That's not apathy, that's a difference of priorities. The entire history of human civilization is the story of ceding certain freedoms for some sort of stability. Parents will happily run government code on all their devices if it means the government strings up pedophiles every week. The internet has been the single largest boon to pedophiles and people making and distributing child porn ever, and parents are tired of waiting for Google and Facebook to hem and haw about how they can't afford to fix it and wont even try. If you want to stop things like Chat Control, give parents an alternative that doesn't take enormous effort to learn and understand, that actually works, that doesn't put the onus on them to magically be able to police every single HTTP request their child's devices make without even giving them the tools to do so. Stop blaming parents for not parenting hard enough. You have no idea how absurd this entire situation is for parents who aren't tech experts. And no, child parental controls on devices right now are utterly unsophisticated, and utterly useless at stopping this. Parents will turn on as much tracking as they can, and STILL find out their kids figured out a fairly trivial way of bypassing it. Stop ignoring the very real problems that modern parents are faced with.
- rsync 1y ago
  Children shouldn’t have devices. They certainly shouldn’t have always online devices capable of accessing social media platforms. US father of three here and if they’re younger than 15 just hand them a Nintendo switch… if you hand them anything at all. You will never win the arms race you’ll be fighting- against both your children and the platforms. Just opt out.

Gormo 1y ago

> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it. That's the same 99% of the population whose motivations and priorities define the incentive structures applicable to politics. If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight without quite a lot of leverage attached to entirely unrelated issues. So the choice is between creating impediments to the enforcement of this bad policy, and at minimum using technology to establish a frontier beyond which it can't reach -- one that is at least available to those motivated to seek it out -- or instead surrendering completely to politics controlling everything, with it being almost a certainty that the political process will be dominated by adverse interests.

dns_snek 1y ago
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy. We will need technical solutions to Chat Control of course, but that's just the last step. First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. An uncensored chat app is useless if we can't install it on our devices without government approval. Unfortunately a significant portion of the tech community is in favor of these walled ~~prisons~~ gardens. Anything we try to do is doomed to fail without freedom to do what we want with devices we own, so until we get past that hurdle I'm hopeless that we'll be able to do anything about Chat Control.
- Gormo 1y ago
  > Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy. I'm not very hopeful about politics generally, for that very reason. The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes. > First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. Another political solution? Not going to happen. We need to work towards a functional mobile OS ecosystem that isn't controlled by Apple, Google, or the government. That won't be easy, and won't offer any immediate short-term options, but work is already in progress, and will in the long run be far more effective than waiting for politics to save us.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    > Another political solution? Not going to happen. I hold out some hope that the EU "faction" responsible for the DMA makes enough progress in the coming years to make the lives of Chat Control proponents difficult by fighting for viability and complete independence of third party app stores. That's why I think it's critical for the EU to strike down Apple's (and now Google's) notarization process. I'd also invite those who support walled gardens and attack the EU for the DMA to rethink their position because if authoritarian legislation like Chat Control succeeds in the EU, it's definitely coming to the US next. Of course an independent OS would be the dream but I'm even less hopeful about that.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    Nobody has the resources like an Apple or a Google to develop an open mobile OS that will be able to run on any hardware
    - Gormo 1y ago
      If anything, I'd say it's the other way around. Apple and Google themselves don't seem to have the resources to do that -- iOS and Android are layers built on top of BSD and Linux, respectively -- whereas it's FOSS projects that are the most dominant and pervasive ones in even far more complex use cases than mobile OSes.
pcrh 1y ago
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue... That depends largely on how the issue is presented. For example, it is now seen as "only sensible" to use pseudonyms online to protect your true identity from random people. Why does the same not apply to your other data? Why should the government have access to pictures of your children?
- Gormo 1y ago
  Which is all well and good, and to the extent that people are won over to those arguments and create more political capital for putting an end to these privacy-violating policies, all for the better. But that's not a substitute for nor mutually exclusive with technical measures to protect privacy, which will work regardless of the political milieu.

mrguyorama 1y ago

> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it. It targets the 99% of the population who do not care about your absolutist stance on encryption, do not care about the technical reason you can't have simultaneous perfect encryption and a gov backdoor, and do not care about math. They care that the world changed pretty much overnight, and they are tired of finding out that their children have been solicited for sex by strangers on the internet and platforms have done everything possible to NOT address that problem. People are tired of being victimized, tired of not having some control over what their children are able to interact with, tired of being blamed for giving their kids access to the internet while their kids are required to use the internet for things like school It's utter insanity to think parents wouldn't rather just cede some freedom to have a fighting chance of bringing up children the way they want, of being able to keep them safe from literal pedophiles. That's not apathy, that's a difference of priorities. The entire history of human civilization is the story of ceding certain freedoms for some sort of stability. Parents will happily run government code on all their devices if it means the government strings up pedophiles every week. The internet has been the single largest boon to pedophiles and people making and distributing child porn ever, and parents are tired of waiting for Google and Facebook to hem and haw about how they can't afford to fix it and wont even try. If you want to stop things like Chat Control, give parents an alternative that doesn't take enormous effort to learn and understand, that actually works, that doesn't put the onus on them to magically be able to police every single HTTP request their child's devices make without even giving them the tools to do so. Stop blaming parents for not parenting hard enough. You have no idea how absurd this entire situation is for parents who aren't tech experts. And no, child parental controls on devices right now are utterly unsophisticated, and utterly useless at stopping this. Parents will turn on as much tracking as they can, and STILL find out their kids figured out a fairly trivial way of bypassing it. Stop ignoring the very real problems that modern parents are faced with.

rsync 1y ago
Children shouldn’t have devices. They certainly shouldn’t have always online devices capable of accessing social media platforms. US father of three here and if they’re younger than 15 just hand them a Nintendo switch… if you hand them anything at all. You will never win the arms race you’ll be fighting- against both your children and the platforms. Just opt out.