Live data from Hacker News

The EU Commission accepts high error rates when checking chats

netzpolitik.org

331–340 of 443 posts

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

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't apply at all. If you get accidentally flagged as criminal it can easily destroy your live, without a years log curt case you might never get properly un-flagged even if you are innocent but then the damage is more then just done. Worse after wards the chance to again be attacked when you are innocent aren't that small because even if you get un-flagged the system is most likely remembering that you had bee…

What do you mean "flagged as criminal"? In EU we have the principle of innocent until proven guilty. No-one is criminal unless they have been through the process of justice. The scenario you are describing just isn't going to happen. I'm glad that the EU are proposing sensible and proportionate solutions to the thorny issue of paedophiles concealing their depraved activities online. The privacy activists have cried w…

> In EU we have the principle of innocent until proven guilty.

This law is de-facto undermining it. Sure the police will investigate and clear the name but Google, Apple and co. won't. They will just treat you as a criminal they don't want to do business with from the accusation onward because that's the cheapest thing to to for them. Not even including the fact that not having access to your mail until the investigation concludes can cause massive damages you will not get reimbursed for.

Also having had a criminal investigation because of child pornography even if proven that you are innocent hugely increases the chance of you being suspect if there is a e.g. child being abducted around where you live. Which can destroy you live even if you are innocent in many ways, e.g. BILD printing headlines implying a person which can basically just be you is most most likely the criminal. Children being forcefully taken away from there parents even if the parents turned out innocent is another thing which did/does happen and can be traumatizing for the children.

This doesn't even include cases where people are willfully wrongly convicted (even if this judgement is later overthrown). Which is a massive problem in the US when the accused is very poor. Through less so in the EU. But it still happens here in some cases, e.g. involving people with mental problems which can't properly represent themself at all and do not have a support net.

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

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't. It is equivalent to an automatized search of all peoples conversations all the time, just because it's automatized and done local on the phone doesn't make it not a search. Which means it's pretty much unconstitutional. It's also probably not very useful as when it is people knowingly committing crime with YT access will know about it and will know how to work around it. And outside of cases of people which…

> Which means it's pretty much unconstitutional. In the USA, I guess. But this is an EU proposal; the EU doesn't have a constitution.

I'm speaking about the German constitution. Which the EU has to be compatible to due to agreements when the EU was formed as else Germany could legally not have joined the EU.

(At least this applies to the articles with special protection in the German constitution, which is in violation with.)

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

#333

It doesn't matter how low the error rate is. The fact that the European Commission wants to have a third (robotic) participant listening in on every digital communication is absolutely ridiculous. Saying that this is about child protection is a blatant lie. This serves only as a stepping stone to introduce other screening criteria later. And with opaque ML models it will be very tedious to determine what the model is…

> "Saying that this is about child protection is a blatant lie." Why do you think this? What evidence would convince you that they are sincerely trying to protect children? Helen Lovejoy wasn't lying, she was sincerely (but irrationally) concerned for the children. HNers believe this conspiracy theory about their own governments (that they are deliberately secretly plotting to be despotic, and using the cover of tryi…

Governments don't need to secretly plot to be despotic. They're fairly open about it.

Here we are discussing a government demanding that they are able to access all private communications in order to ensure it's all perfectly legal, and yet you don't see this as despotic.

So it's not a conspiracy, because so many people don't even see it as despotic they aren't afraid to do it in the open.

Losing the ability to have a private conversation online is so blatantly harmful to individual liberties I cannot comprehend how a thinking person isn't alarmed by it.

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

#334

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…

Merkel is not christian-conservative except for the label of the party itself. She hit most of the progressive boxes really, especially "no nations, no borders" and the climate sale of indulgence.

I also wanna add that Merkel was elected by big city voters as well and not just the (framed stupid and wrong) "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.

Realistically speaking once a party is in charge the people have no saying in the politics and the only thing that matters is how it is framed in the media. If the media says that people like it, it's okay, otherwise they might rethink it, but even that is not a guarantee. Given that most media outlets are dependent on government money they are mostly mouthpieces of the same.

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

#335
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my god, not at all. The Greens, are more ideologically driven than any other party and not in a good way(and that ideology does not line up with their campaign promises at all). They have been the single most destructive force in German politics and they have not kept a single campaign promise. This is the supposed "Green" party that campaigned on anti-war and not sending weapons to war zones and closing coal that…

How can you complain about them being "ideologically driven", and simultaneously criticize them for not insisting on anti-war/environmental ideas in the face of war in Ukraine? I say they're doing realpolitik, even if it might lose them some of their more ideologically entrenched voters.

>How can you complain about them being "ideologically driven", and simultaneously criticize them for not insisting on anti-war/environmental ideas in the face of war in Ukraine?

Simple, the Greens have refocused on US-style identity politics and abandonded environmental concerns as their main focus.

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

#336
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#337

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…

what stops your govt from doing the same even after existing the EU?

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you think that the potential capture of a few criminals outweighs the violation of privacy of communications of 450 million humans? You'd be okay with forcing this onto people who don't want this, and the majority who won't even know that this is happening?

I don't agree that having a CSAM detection algorithm running in your messaging client is a violation of privacy. If it detects something and alerts the relevant authorities, there will then be a proportional reduction of privacy while they investigate, but this is true of any criminal investigation. Doing it this way strikes a reasonable balance. Other alternatives include doing nothing at all, or sending a copy of a…

Do you not feel that your devices should wholly act in your interest, instead of possibly falsely accusing you of crimes? Would you want to have your devices and the state spying on you in a way that you can't introspect or control? Or unable to oppose, should its usage be extended to other domains? What about the presumption of innocence?

Why trust the executive without judicial oversight? What if they use their powers illegally, or misuse the files they receive? What if they are hacked? You will never know what happens in the black box.

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

#339

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…

> 90% precision is actually quite good

It is good from the perspective of comparing this to other ML models. It is not good from a real world perspective.

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is an EU proposal; the EU doesn't have a constitution. The European Convention on Human Rights applies in all EU member states.

The ECHR is a treaty, not a constitution.

But all EU members auto include it into their constitution or at least law.

Through not necessary the ECHR but a more general term of "human rights" but that is legally basically the same as long as they don't exit the treaty.

Even Russia did so until a few years ago (through they kinda ignored it at the same time, too).

E.g. it's §1 of the German constitution (yes the very first "law" in the constitution).

Post reply on HN