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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

#311

Post by raverbashing »

paganel wrote: post #222

As an EU citizen I didn't know exactly what that Chat Control thing was, so I web searched it: > The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. [1] Yeah, that will go down well, a central government checking our private conversations for "suspicious content". Of co…

I always find it funny those "leave the EU" posts because it's usually based on 1) thinking the EU is something apart from the constituent states 2) Naively thinking their countries have nothing to do with the latest EU Commission proposals. And of course the ignorance on the process helps those who want to pass more controversial proposals

(as an example see the latest UK "proposals" for the internet)

> didn't know exactly what that Chat Control

Interesting, several discussions about ChatControl were posted semi-recently (just a minor observation)

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

#312

Post by flipbrad »

easytiger wrote: post #270
flipbrad wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vienna is in Austria, not Germany

On that point Austrian privacy laws are insane. CCTV is a nightmare to set up there. https://edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2018/first-austria...

So is data loss prevention or other forms of workplace monitoring

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

#313

Post by dathinab »

gloppers wrote: post #87
dathinab wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and one separate to this EU regulation. no, not separated at all laws have to take the implicit effects they have into account they could have added a clause to require providers to not close the account until the police investigation finishes. They didn't. Which means they are implicitly partial responsible for such abuse.

That is a broader consumer rights issue which, I agree, the EU should do something about too. But adding a clause to this regulation would not solve that wider problem.

yes, but it would make this law less worse

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

#314

Post by croes »

DangerousPie wrote: post #39

Important to note that this is not 10% of all messages being falsely flagged (= 10% false positive rate), but 10% of flagged messages being false positives (= 90% precision). As someone who works with these types of classification problems in a different context, 90% precision is actually quite good - especially assuming there is some sort of manual review process to take care of the 10%. Whether that makes this whol…

Is it really good? What's the rate of false negatives? I could build a search engines that searches only one specific text classified as grooming. I wouldn't find much of the other grooming in chats but if I find a positive it's with a pretty high precision.

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

#315

Post by kmeisthax »

Retr0id wrote: post #35
sparsely wrote: post #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,…

10% of all OK images may be falsely flagged, but what about specific categories of images? What would the error rate be for an album of legal pornography? What would the error rate be for an album of a family spending the day at a beach?

The (false negative) error rate on a parent taking pictures of an unusual growth on their child's naughty bits and texting it to their doctor is 0% - as in, the algorithm correctly identifies this as CSAM every time. Nevertheless, nobody[0] would consider this CSAM, based purely on context that... absolutely will not be available to any of the intermediaries charged with scanning for it. What system does the scanning won't matter, because it's not a question of accuracy; it's a question of missing information.

This isn't even a hypothetical. The case I mentioned above actually happened. Google narc'd on someone who did exactly the thing I mentioned, and they got a police investigation for their trouble. And while the police - armed with exhonorating context - did eventually drop charges, they are still banned from Google for life. Yes, Google was contacted by journalists about this guy and they said they stand by their initial decision to permaban him.

The core danger with any automated scanning system is not the false positive or false negative rate - that is an engineering problem. It will get better. The danger is the amount of legal-but-crime-adjacent activities that will be effectively prosecuted as crimes. I mentioned child telehealth above, but there's other instances of automated prosecution expanding far beyond the letter or spirit of the law. YouTube Content ID is top-of-mind for me; though that has two problems. It both kills fair use, and correctly prosecutes copyright infringements that people expect to fly under the radar.

[0] Child anti-explotation agencies still caution against this because they don't want your kid to get used to getting photographed down there. However, they wouldn't consider this sexual abuse.

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

#316

Post by DubiousPusher »

Maybe I'm missing something here but it seems to me there is a basic question here. Do two or more people have a right to privately communicate via a third party?

If the answer is yes, then regardless of the accuracy of the system or the mass nature of the communication network this is objectionable law making.

IMO, it is a fundamental human right to communicate privately.

The only real question is what is the responsibility of a third party. If I give a shipper illicit material are they responsible to inspect it and report it? I'm personally unaware of the law regarding this but I assume your shipper is not required by law to open every package it ships and report upon it. Are they required to do a percentage?

If not than what the state is claiming here is a right by convenience. It happens that digital communication is easier to inspect than crates. Therefore, the state can create an expectation of one third party it does not of another.

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

#317

Post by yrgulation »

paganel wrote: post #222

As an EU citizen I didn't know exactly what that Chat Control thing was, so I web searched it: > The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. [1] Yeah, that will go down well, a central government checking our private conversations for "suspicious content". Of co…

> but the money (still) coming in from Bruxelles is too good to leave aside for pesky political principles

This is a myth. The money Bruxelles “sends” are money lost by customs duties no longer levied by individual states. There are no new money “spent” as such.

As for leaving the eu, speak for yourself. Romania has by and large a favourable view of the eu. Those who usually dislike it are either corrupt politicians or really really dumb people (conspiracy types).

Germany has many faults for the current state of the eu, but as in any democracy, you can vote better representatives for the eu parliament, instead of the bunch Romania sends at the moment. That way your view will be better supported in their debates against mps from that country.

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

#318

Post by Longhanks »

t_mann wrote: post #307
paganel wrote: post #222

As an EU citizen I didn't know exactly what that Chat Control thing was, so I web searched it: > The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. [1] Yeah, that will go down well, a central government checking our private conversations for "suspicious content". Of co…

> the only viable solution I see for my country is an exit from the EU The UK thought so too, now they're frontrunning the EU on scraping privacy. I honestly don't even understand one could think an EU exit would address those problems in any way - corporate lobbying is inherent to politics, just look at your national government (whichever that currently is). And realistically speaking, the smaller the entity, the le…

Because, depending on the country, another government may be elected that will change the course.

I can't elect anyone in the EU commission. Nor did I vote for my country to put the EU treaties above my constitution.

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

#319

Post by dane-pgp »

vidarh wrote: post #281
dane-pgp wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long until the bureaucrats start saying "These unregulated foreign VPNs are a danger to our private data / economy / national security / children"? I mean, if a jurisdiction is making people's phones spy on them, then it's not much of a stretch to also make those phones not connect to unapproved VPNs, or even to prevent them installing unapproved apps (despite the recent win of the EU supporting sideloading on mo…

Unless they try to aggressively regulate the sale, import and manufacture (at this point, many hobbyist level homebrew retrocomputers are powerful enough to run a VPN) of general purpose computer devices or aggressively firewall all of the EU and punish anyone using to obscure encrypted data flows through approved protocols, this will of course only stop the people who actually don't have anything to hide. It'll be t…

> It'll be trivial to work around for anyone actually up to no good

I never claimed they were motivated to actually stop these crimes.

If the real ultimate goal is to prevent the spreading of "state secrets" (i.e. journalists exposing government malfeasance), or reduce copyright infringement, or limiting the spread of "disinformation", or banning memes that insult public figures, then the government needn't worry about "hobbyist level homebrew retrocomputers". Most people will continue to use mainstream platforms, and most governments mostly care about controlling most people.

Besides, the next step will be to make ISPs deny service to any machine which doesn't have Secure Boot enabled, and which isn't running an "approved" OS, which checks every executable you run. Suddenly your general purpose computing device isn't very useful any more.

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

#320

Post by hammyhavoc »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #288
hammyhavoc wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long believed this, but surprisingly, very few Germans I've spoken to feel this way about it, admittedly my sample is Berlin-centric, so perhaps that isn't a very good litmus test for general German sentiment considering the demographics of Berlin consist of a lot of non-Germans who likely aren't that clued-up, and that perhaps skews sentiment as a whole.

Big cities are always a lot more progressive. But a christian-conservative like Merkel wouldn't have come to power if it wasn't for the more rural masses. They must have enough votes to influence policy in such a big way. And those are the ones that are the most susceptible to 'for the children!!!' type privacy invasion. At least in my experience here in the Netherlands, this is usually the angle those measures are p…

That's very interesting re Hetzner. When I signed up Hetzner about two weeks ago, I wasn't asked for any kind of ID, in fact I was quite surprised how little friction there was. Experience hasn't been good though, so you haven't missed out on much. Downtime and connectivity issues have meant hours of time wasted on an issue that wasn't even at our end. Will check out Scaleway!
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