Live data from Hacker News

The EU Commission accepts high error rates when checking chats

netzpolitik.org

21–30 of 443 posts

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

#21

With 90% accuracy, and assuming the incidence of true grooming in random conversation is way smaller, they are setting themselves up for the base rate fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy

In the linked Netzpolitik article (in German) it's pretty clear that the 90% refers to Precision (i.e. 90% of flagged instances are True Positives), not accuracy. Still, the article (and probably the primary documents as well) do a horrible job of differentiating such concepts.

[For clarification: Don't understand as my post as an argument for Chat Control, please :)]

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

#23
post #20

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that they do not have any idea what they’re doing.

Of course they do and they do it on purpose. They are not some good but stupid people. They are clever and evil. Or led by their own interest. Which makes them do evil even if they are not. And that’s the worst kind of evil.

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

#24
That old adage "if you've nothing to hide, then you've nothing to fear" is oft berated in these sort of discussions, but it really does apply here.

This regulation is for the purposes of criminal investigation into serious harms against children, not for spying on whatever innocuous messages you happen to be sharing with friends and family. The privacy fears are being way overblown for us ordinary people.

Paedophiles, on the other hand, do not deserve privacy. They need to be scrutinised their entire lives to keep children - the targets of their vile depravity - from harm.

I support this regulation; every parent should.

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

#25

Which messenger do we switch to if this goes in? I don't think I'd have an issue convincing people. Is Signal subject to this? Telegram? Do we need something "less mainstream"?

You could use your own Matrix server as far as I know. It's annoying you need to go that far just to prevent the EU from snooping on your communication.

You have to keep in mind that to do this you'd have to blacklist every other server from federating, keep all rooms private and disable public room discovery completely.

And it still wouldn't really be all that private, because matrix is public oriented protocol and nowhere on the main website do you see the word "privacy" in context of user privacy.

You also cannot really delete users, nor force deletion of their messages from servers that you're federating with once the user uses the disable endpoint.

Also, matrix server specification is garbage, synapse is the only implementation that at least pretends to work reliably because of that, and it's maintained by a for-profit organization.

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

#27
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…

Before I miss it. Here are the "good guys" at work (paywall): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

We can see "AI" at work. And even if a human checks it you are doomed, because you don't fit in the business plan. Therefore never upload private data on a strangers computer. The cloud is by definition a strangers computer! It is nice that you can find your lost phone with their website but you shall not store any private data on the computer of someone else. If you want keep data in sync across multiple devices multiple providers providers and tools allow for that:

  * https://syncthing.net/ (recommend: everyone)
  * https://git-scm.com/ (recommend: it-professionals)
  * https://mailbox.org (recommend: everyone, including mail, calendar, contacts, notes)
  * https://posteo.de/ (see above)
  * https://nextcloud.com (recommend: hobby and it-professionals)
The situation changes somewhat if you pay with money for service instead with data. Now you are the customer and not the people working with your data. Shared-Hosting usually comes with readily usable E-Mail and other stuff, sometimes with automatic setup of nextcloud or similiar.

Does someone have recommendations for US based E-Mail providers which are reliable and "not free"?

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

#29
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…

I'm for E2E encryption wherever it's applicable, and for individuals having the ability to be fully anonymous online, but it's not useful to claim it doesn't have drawbacks as well. Yes, it's true that it might it harder to arrest criminals because of encryption, but the alternative that nothing can be 100% private is so much worse.

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

#30
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…

I'm for E2E encryption wherever it's applicable, and for individuals having the ability to be fully anonymous online, but it's not useful to claim it doesn't have drawbacks as well. Yes, it's true that it might it harder to arrest criminals because of encryption, but the alternative that nothing can be 100% private is so much worse.

It was hard to arrest criminals before digital communication as well, I’m sure we’ll deal.
Post reply on HN