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European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids

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Re: European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids

#61

This is the true face of the EU. Anyone who opposes it will be branded as a child molester. Even if the parliament rejects this proposal, the next power hungry authoritarian can simply try again, until eventually one parliament will pass it. You can be either in support of total surveillance, or in support of abolishing the EU. There is no middle ground.

> Even if the parliament rejects this proposal, the next power hungry authoritarian can simply try again, until eventually one parliament will pass it.

Indeed, in the words of the previous President of the European Commission:

We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Juncker#1999

The current President of the European Commission has been a long time advocate for Internet control:

However, in the digital community, her posturing for the EU’s top job has caused concern. In 2000, when Von Der Leyen was Families minister, she advocated for the mandatory blocking of child pornography online via a list of offending websites managed by police authorities. Germany’s Pirate Party claimed that the law would lead to censorship of the internet.

The outcry that resulted was dubbed the ‘Zensursula’ scandal, blending the German word for censorship (“Zensur”) and her name (“Ursula”). The move was eventually repealed after it being challenged broadly, including a petition that had garnered tens of thousands of signatures.https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/digital-brief-...

Re: European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids

#62
post #45
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was the tradeoff, it would be worth it. This is giving up their privacy for nothing in return, or worse, negative restrictions on their political freedom and freedom of expression.

Speak for yourself. Privacy and freedom are more important than security to many, many people.

Sounds good, doesn't work.

Security and freedom are "platonic" ideals. None of those exists in the abstract, as a real world thing, and you can't find one without the other in the wild (in a Disney-like world, maybe, but not in the real world, in the presense of others, that is people that want to deprive you of either/both, and can benefit from doing so).

Trivially speaking, if some thugs can just come and beat you with no police or legal resources available to you, you don't have either pricacy or security. Both are at their mercy.

You could of course defend yourself, but then you're still getting your freedom through security: it's just that in this case you're obligated to cater get that security on your own.

So, we trade some freedom (giving state the ability to enforce laws, have police) in excange for security. And vice versa.

But in any case, my point above was different: that what TFA descrives is not a tradeoff between privacy and security, it is giving up privacy for no real benefit. If anything, losing encryption costs in both privacy AND security.

Re: European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids

#63

This is the true face of the EU. Anyone who opposes it will be branded as a child molester. Even if the parliament rejects this proposal, the next power hungry authoritarian can simply try again, until eventually one parliament will pass it. You can be either in support of total surveillance, or in support of abolishing the EU. There is no middle ground.

We can't have nice things it seems.

Overall EU is a good idea, but total surveillance is a scary, scary concept that must be avoided at all cost, even at the cost of EU as concept.

Re: European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids

#64

This is the true face of the EU. Anyone who opposes it will be branded as a child molester. Even if the parliament rejects this proposal, the next power hungry authoritarian can simply try again, until eventually one parliament will pass it. You can be either in support of total surveillance, or in support of abolishing the EU. There is no middle ground.

Oh please, that's like saying "you either become rich or kill yourself". Ridiculous.

This kind of shit pops up everywhere, not only the EU. I have no idea what tf is driving it, probably the same thing that turned many countries into dictatorships.

Human nature, really, but how these assholes always get into power is a mystery to me.

Re: European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids

#65

"Protecting kids" is a load of nonsense. It's just a convenient excuse and sounds much better than "we want to read your private stuff".

I don't quite understand, to what end? This is clearly a good step towards authoritarianism, but then what? People "disappearing" and more population control?

The world sometimes seems so ridiculous I can't believe it.

Re: European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids

#66

I'd love to know what percentage of those CSAM numbers are inflated by 14-17 yrs old sharing their own pictures (and their SOs leaking to someone else w/o permission) versus what most of the people imagine when government yells "CP!!!"

Not the same metric, but related: > Approximately 200,000 people in 38 states are currently on the sex offender registry for crimes they committed as children. Some were put on the registry when they were as young as eight years old. https://jlc.org/issues/juvenile-sex-offender-registry-sorna

Oh no, I saw myself naked in the mirror so many times as a kid!

Re: European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids

#68
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you meant this piece with "scanning of conversations": > As mentioned, detecting ‘grooming’ would have a positive impact on the fundamental rights of potential victims especially by contributing to the prevention of abuse; if swift action is taken, it may even prevent a child from suffering harm. At the same time, the detection process is generally speaking the most intrusive one for users (compared to the d…

> “becoming ever more reliable with time, as the algorithms learn“ I mean considering Amazon has put in kajillions of dollars on their learning algorithms and yet now in 2022 those algorithms still aren’t even smart enough to figure out trivial stuff, like that I’m probably not gonna buy a second air fryer immediately after buying a first one, and stop advertising them to me. What hope do we have for this new algorit…

It just showcases either the ones making the decision are naïve or they have an ulterior motive. They tried to justify it with the following footnote:

>For example, Microsoft reports that the accuracy of its grooming detection tool is 88%, meaning that out of 100 conversations flagged as possible criminal solicitation of children, 12 can be excluded upon review and will not be reported to law enforcement; see annex 8 of the Impact Assessment.

Of course, anyone could poke a dozen holes in this statement. "Possible", so there still needs to be a ton of review. Microsoft reporting on its own detection tool. Etc.

Re: European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids

#69
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the headline is horribly biased (could we change it to "think of the children!"?) but it seems to me if you want to protect children from pedos that you would need to read both of their email, so I don't understand how breaking privacy threatens children.

Mandating that the takedown go through this agency means states won't be able to hire private companies specialising in takedowns (and faster). Takedowns take way longer, which hurts the children.

>We found that the specialist contractors who take down phishing websites for banks would typically take six hours to remove an offending website, while the Internet Watch Foundation – which has a legal monopoly on taking down child-abuse material in the UK – would often take six weeks.

[...]

>So it’s really stupid for the European Commission to mandate centralised takedown by a police agency for the whole of Europe. This will be make everything really hard to fix once they find out that it doesn’t work, and it becomes obvious that child abuse websites stay up longer, causing real harm.

Re: European Commission prefers breaking privacy to protecting kids

#70
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you meant this piece with "scanning of conversations": > As mentioned, detecting ‘grooming’ would have a positive impact on the fundamental rights of potential victims especially by contributing to the prevention of abuse; if swift action is taken, it may even prevent a child from suffering harm. At the same time, the detection process is generally speaking the most intrusive one for users (compared to the d…

> “becoming ever more reliable with time, as the algorithms learn“ I mean considering Amazon has put in kajillions of dollars on their learning algorithms and yet now in 2022 those algorithms still aren’t even smart enough to figure out trivial stuff, like that I’m probably not gonna buy a second air fryer immediately after buying a first one, and stop advertising them to me. What hope do we have for this new algorit…

Maybe they aren't optimizing for conversions but instead for running out budgets? Amazon often has anti-consumer practices, that likely evolved that way because it improves bottom line, you'd think how hard they make it to search reviews or to filter reviews for a specific version of a product would be simple fixes, but likely testing has shown those things decrease sales.
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