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Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

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Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#131

Post by claudiawerner »

bitL wrote: post #106
ngngngng wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> captures 99% of child exploitation and terrorism-related content Credit where it's due, good on them building such effective systems to catch this content.

Image filtering is now trivial even using simple transfer learning, leading to >99% accuracy. It's just the training datasets might be super disgusting and question one's will to live when confronted with the savagery that is going on around the world.

Wasn't there some issue a while ago that the UK police were having trouble distinguishing pictures of sandy deserts from nude bodies?

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#132

Post by random3 »

saagarjha wrote: post #5

> We are writing to request that Facebook does not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety. Oh, so you’re asking for more end-to-end encryption? > While the letter acknowledges that Facebook, which owns Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, captures 99% of child exploitation and terrorism-related content t…

That is indeed a lazy argument. The proper angle for the public argument is what's the tradeoff? What do you lose by trading privacy?(as you're clearly not impacting child safety by dropping privacy related to a digital asset). And second: is encryption the number one fix for the actual concern? - i.e. if (physical) child safety is the most important concern for you (the citizen) what has the largest impact on that?

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#133

Post by mLuby »

posix_compliant wrote: post #114
saagarjha wrote: post #5

> We are writing to request that Facebook does not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety. Oh, so you’re asking for more end-to-end encryption? > While the letter acknowledges that Facebook, which owns Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, captures 99% of child exploitation and terrorism-related content t…

99% of domestic disturbances happen in private homes. Should they put cameras there, too?

Alexa should be enough…

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#134

Post by eloff »

robrenaud wrote: post #118
eloff wrote: post #16

I hate these requests for government back doors into tech communication software in the name of "the children". Let the parents worry about and protect their own children. Let the government mind its own business and stay out of ours.

And if the parents are the abusers, then it's okay? I am still pro E2E encryption, especially given the Snowden revelations (the US gov cannot be trusted to be responsible), but it does come at a high cost. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...

That's a really horrible situation, but running an information drag net on the entire world is the wrong way to crack down on that kind of crime.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#135

Post by wastedhours »

zelon88 wrote: post #51
wheelerwj wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

more or less agreed, would def like to see how they ended up at 99%

Right. Assuming that they know that they're missing 1% of cases insinuates that they know enough about the 1% they're missing to quantify it.

Isn't that right based on the statement though? The implication is 99% of the identified cases on Facebook are caught by Facebook's systems, the 1% not caught by Facebook's systems are tracked by other means. 100% of identified cases, not 100% of all cases.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#136

Post by dylan604 »

Brushfire wrote: post #11

If they don't do E2E, users will abandon Facebook for platforms that do support it (and already are). And they aren't doing this to commit crimes, but to prevent advertisements from targeting every conversation they've ever had.

Please name these other platforms

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#138

Post by brunoTbear »

zzzcpan wrote: post #109
brunoTbear wrote: post #24

The claim of catching 99% of activity is really hard to justify. In many detection systems you cannot know your true number of false negatives. It's inherently unknowable in this case. A better metric would be mean time to detection for a given CEP sharer or perhaps a metric around how much CEP is shared before detection, or perhaps a metric for network size of CEP and how well FB can clean up an entire network at on…

> There has to be some nuance from the absolute privacy folks on this one. How do we balance the need to fight child abuse with privacy? There isn't. This is a logical fallacy. Violating everyone's privacy is not the way to fight child abuse, not even one of the ways that can do anything to prevent it.

I'm not sure what the logical fallacy is you're referring to. I'm not advocating that we backdoor encryption. I'm asking what's the nuance in privacy vs crime prevention. I guess your position is one of an absolute, and therefore, to me, not especially interesting.

I am curious what you think are the ways we can fight child abuse. It seems to me we have some obligation as technologists to see that our works aren't used to harm the most vulnerable.

Re: Attorney General will ask Zuckerberg to halt plans for end-to-end encryption

#140

Post by brunoTbear »

claytoneast wrote: post #112
brunoTbear wrote: post #24

The claim of catching 99% of activity is really hard to justify. In many detection systems you cannot know your true number of false negatives. It's inherently unknowable in this case. A better metric would be mean time to detection for a given CEP sharer or perhaps a metric around how much CEP is shared before detection, or perhaps a metric for network size of CEP and how well FB can clean up an entire network at on…

The sources in that article who lead these anti-child-trafficking/image organizations complain about cripplingly inadequate budgets and lack of human resources (employees). They do NOT complain about end-to-end encryption. They ask for more people, and more money, which the government is apparently consistently unwilling to grant them. Instead, the govt foists this absolute horseshit about limiting/backdooring e2e on…

WFIW I didn't advocate backdooring either, I'm just asking how we, as technologists, balance what I think are reasonable and compelling goals: protect user data, and protect children.

One reasonable answer is that FB/Google/etc. should donate or donate more (Google is called out as donating already) to these organizations. I think another reasonable answer is that technologists donate our time, perhaps as 20% projects or as sabbaticals to these orgs and help them modernize.

It does seem Congress (per the NYTimes article I linked above) isn't doling out as much funding as we would like to see.

And, in fairness, children are being harmed here, and at an incredibly alarming rate. Please do read the NYTimes article. The Times is, IMO, a fairly responsible actor in truth telling.

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