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Messaging and chat control

patrick-breyer.de

141–150 of 336 posts

Re: Messaging and chat control

#141
post #128
post #98

The scary thing about this is that many people have images that look like child porn at home: Family photos of naked grandchildren playing at the sea or in the mud, as well as sexting between consenting teenagers. There is no way automatic classification can distinguish these from real child porn, because they look almost identical and thus many private pictures will be shared with the government. This not only infri…

Not only that, but child porn seems to mean a different thing in every place. The Netherlands and other European countries define the age of consent at 16, meaning some things that are perfectly legal there will be a ticket to prison in many countries. Now you don't just have an engineering problem, you will also have to spend a bunch of money to have some lawyers review your spec.

The age of consent goes low as 14 in Europe but that doesn't change the definition of CP. Probably they won't prosecute when both parties are underage and such so heavily but consent age doesn't change the fact that nudity is 18+.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#142
post #6

Privacy is something that people usually only care about on a theoretical level. Practically speaking, they're often happy to not care so much at all if they get something more tangible in return. --- Company: Excuse me, would you mind us profiling you through an accurate survey of most of your everyday purchases? Customer: Heck no! Company: What if we let you collect "points" that will maybe someday safe you a littl…

There's a difference between me _opt-in_ to give private data in exchange for points, and that being unilaterally imposed. It's also kind of harder to abuse information on my shopping list, whereas there's plenty of ways to abuse having total and complete access to all communication between private parties.

Think of it this way: what is more important to you, the convenience of exchanging text messages with your friends, or keeping these conversations private?

Re: Messaging and chat control

#143
post #128
post #98

The scary thing about this is that many people have images that look like child porn at home: Family photos of naked grandchildren playing at the sea or in the mud, as well as sexting between consenting teenagers. There is no way automatic classification can distinguish these from real child porn, because they look almost identical and thus many private pictures will be shared with the government. This not only infri…

Not only that, but child porn seems to mean a different thing in every place. The Netherlands and other European countries define the age of consent at 16, meaning some things that are perfectly legal there will be a ticket to prison in many countries. Now you don't just have an engineering problem, you will also have to spend a bunch of money to have some lawyers review your spec.

Pretty sure porn involving 16-17 year olds in the Netherlands is also very illegal though, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#144
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but child porn seems to mean a different thing in every place. The Netherlands and other European countries define the age of consent at 16, meaning some things that are perfectly legal there will be a ticket to prison in many countries. Now you don't just have an engineering problem, you will also have to spend a bunch of money to have some lawyers review your spec.

The age of consent goes low as 14 in Europe but that doesn't change the definition of CP. Probably they won't prosecute when both parties are underage and such so heavily but consent age doesn't change the fact that nudity is 18+.

> nudity is 18+.

You mean like in movies, those "can't see boobies before you're 18" labels? Because capturing a nude 13-year-olds is perfectly legal, just not in a pornographic manner. E.g. my Dutch biology book had nude ~6 and ~11 year old girls depicted (as well as an adult) for educating different stages of development.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#145
post #15

This report [0] is all I could find. I would have expected this to be more widely reported, and I'm surprised to see it isn't. [0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2021-0319...

That link shows the existing legislation, approved in July. Today it doesn't mandate anybody to scan anything but effectively _allows_ service providers to scan for CSAM, if they wish, by defining "combating online child sexual abuse" as a legitimate reason to process personal data within the limitations of the EU's various privacy & data protection directives (GDPR being the obvious one, but there's others too). It'…

>> The motivating concern was that service providers who do already scan for this kind of abuse material (everywhere in the world) were at risk of having to disable such scanning entirely for EU citizens due to privacy laws.

I'm curious if this was a situation where they might have decided that scanning was more important given the implications of processing CSAM? It seems like this is a way for authorities to influence any data processor.

The Apple news last week seemed to come out of the blue and it felt a bit like a trade-off to get out from under the authorities to some degree. This is just conjecture though.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#146

If it becomes mandatory for email providers to screen emails, will services such as Protonmail become illegal in the EU? Since they don't have access to their users' email content because of encryption.

> Since they don't have access to their users' email content because of encryption. Regular emails (i.e. without home-brewn encryption that Protonmail provided - and I'm yet to receive such email from any of my contacts who use Protonmail), or any inbound email received from third-party servers are of course not encrypted and Protonmail has pretty easy access to their contents.

Protonmail uses PGP and not "home-brewn encryption" and encryption is on by default between Protonmail users.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#147
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Individual countries are equally corrupted by big businesses and authoritarian leaning, but you can generally count on inefficient flip flopping right-left parties to not do too much damage in any direction. The EU seems to be way more efficient in getting us straight to 1984 or Soviet Russia V2.

I am replying to all the posts pushing this defeatist agenda. Not only it's wrong, but it's also dangerous. It is representatives of the countries in the Council of the EU voting these legislations through: hold them accountable as you would hold them accountable locally. Don't fall for the narration of the EU as a third party where your local representatives have no say. If four countries veto the bill, the bill is…

How am I supposed to keep the party that I did not vote for (25% did) accountable? Nobody is gonna disrupt the government because of "such small issues".

Re: Messaging and chat control

#148

I wonder if all of this (Apple, Chatcontrol, etc.) will spark a backlash against computing devices. The government can't rifle through your physical photos to search for [bad thing], at least for the moment. Will we see a resurgence of Instamatic cameras and other offline-first devices? Depressingly, I'm sure most people won't care. But hey, I can hope.

Analogies between IT and physical world are often less than helpful but before digital photos most people would be developing photos in specialized studios. If these studios noticed what they thought was CSAM they would report it to police. One could of course develop photos themselves (like one can selfhost everything today), but as soon as other parties get involved they can (and should) report problematic material to police.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#149
post #143
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but child porn seems to mean a different thing in every place. The Netherlands and other European countries define the age of consent at 16, meaning some things that are perfectly legal there will be a ticket to prison in many countries. Now you don't just have an engineering problem, you will also have to spend a bunch of money to have some lawyers review your spec.

Pretty sure porn involving 16-17 year olds in the Netherlands is also very illegal though, but correct me if I'm wrong.

I believe porn involving 16 year olds is still legal in the Netherlands. Which doesn't mean it is being commercially produced anymore, for obvious reasons. Maybe a Dutch reader can provide more insight into this.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#150

I wonder if all of this (Apple, Chatcontrol, etc.) will spark a backlash against computing devices. The government can't rifle through your physical photos to search for [bad thing], at least for the moment. Will we see a resurgence of Instamatic cameras and other offline-first devices? Depressingly, I'm sure most people won't care. But hey, I can hope.

> Depressingly, I'm sure most people won't care. But hey, I can hope.

I'm afraid you're right. Nobody cares about their photos being searched for whatever by shady organisations and corrupt agencys.

- Facebook: 2.8 billion active monthly users

- Google Mail: 1.8 million users

- iCloud: >850 million users

- Google Drive: about a billion users

- Dropbox: >600 million user.

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