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The EU Commission accepts high error rates when checking chats

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Re: The EU Commission accepts high error rates when checking chats

#3
The commission does not seek to break encryption

Okay.

Encryption is not only important to protect private communication, but would also help perpetrators/criminals

No.

It is there to protect us from perpetrators, criminals and all the people which think they are on the good side. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Authoritarian regimes on our planet always thought they were the "good guys". Encryption is actually there to protect us from you!

The mothers and fathers of the German Grundgesetz (~ constitution) learned that the hard way.

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_10.html

Re: The EU Commission accepts high error rates when checking chats

#5
Due to the volume of messages and the endless need to maximise profits, companies will accept 10% flagged content may be false positives but act against all 100% of flagged content, meaning that the default will be innocent people having action taken against them but with no real recourse to clear their name.

I also didn't find anything in there about expectations for reducing numbers of false negatives (where automation fails to flag suspicious activity). Content control is basically just PR if it ignores the majority of activity it is designed to police.

Re: The EU Commission accepts high error rates when checking chats

#6
If this ever gets into production I hope the tech community can come together and work on a system to generate false positives until this system is no longer viable.

Let's hope its a typical EU project and will take at least a decade to complete, or better, let's just hope it will outright fail.

Re: The EU Commission accepts high error rates when checking chats

#7
No comment on the policy etc, but I think the presentation of the numbers is a bit misleading.

That 10% is the percent of flagged images which are actually OK. Whether this represents a large fraction of all legal content depends on how much illegal content there is. It would be better if they quoted the false positive rate and false negative rate as a fraction of legal/illegal images respectively.

e.g. if 1/100,000,000 legal images are flagged incorrectly, and 100% of illegal images are flagged correctly, then a corpus of 100,000,000 legal images + 9 illegal images would result in the stats in the headline. That seems like a pretty good system (ignoring any principled objections to the scanning in the first place).

Re: The EU Commission accepts high error rates when checking chats

#9
post #3

The commission does not seek to break encryption Okay. Encryption is not only important to protect private communication, but would also help perpetrators/criminals No. It is there to protect us from perpetrators, criminals and all the people which think they are on the good side. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Authoritarian regimes on our planet always thought they were the "good guys". Encryption i…

Well. Nothing is just white or black.
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