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Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

simplex.chat

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Re: Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

#21

Post by abofh »

CJefferson wrote: post #2

I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but I don't buy that end-to-end encryption will, overall, increase children's safety. I'm happy to see strong evidence one way of the other, but this article is very one-sided. Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communi…

It is 100% the parents responsibility to have an active enough role in their Child's life to know who they're interacting with and to provide appropriate supervision. If your child is getting addicted to something, it's because they've been enabled, perhaps through their friends devices or what have you.

You cannot push the burden of being a responsible parent on people who do not wish to be your childrens parent. Society owes you places they can go that they are safe, not padded walls on every sharp corner they might bump into -- that's baby proofing, and it has to be done at home.

Re: Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

#23

Post by js8 »

CJefferson wrote: post #2

I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but I don't buy that end-to-end encryption will, overall, increase children's safety. I'm happy to see strong evidence one way of the other, but this article is very one-sided. Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communi…

I don't follow your argument in the last paragraph. What has the fact that children get addicted to social networks to do with the encrypted, peer-to-peer communication? It seems to me like they are two different things.

While I agree it might be healthy for children to avoid social networks (its addictive features, like algorithmic feeds), I don't think it's healthy for them to avoid any Internet communication.

That's how humans are gonna do things in the future, you plug-in yourself to the collective consciousness, unmediated instant communication with many, many people (of your own choice). It's a positive thing, and children need to learn how to operate in that environment. Forbidding them from communicating (for fear of predators) is backwards. It's like forbidding computers to kids because there are violent video games.

Re: Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

#24

Post by Xelbair »

wadim wrote: post #18
CJefferson wrote: post #2

I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but I don't buy that end-to-end encryption will, overall, increase children's safety. I'm happy to see strong evidence one way of the other, but this article is very one-sided. Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communi…

Didn't we have quite a few scandals involving LE saving and sharing media as well? Doesn't make it much better, you'll just have a bigger pool of people looking at the unencrypted chats. I think a better solution would be filters which run only locally and can block problematic messages, as well as alarm platform provider/LE/parents. E2E still works, but you have some safety as well.

Who decides what's problematic message or not?

Re: Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

#25

Post by axegon_ »

CJefferson wrote: post #2

I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but I don't buy that end-to-end encryption will, overall, increase children's safety. I'm happy to see strong evidence one way of the other, but this article is very one-sided. Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communi…

Not a whole lot to discuss here, I fully agree. This goes beyond children's safety and into general privacy(which the vast majority of people are totally clueless about, contrary to their beliefs): no amount of encryption can compensate for bad privacy habits. People tend to think that the bottomless pit that is the internet and the billions of users will keep them hidden, which couldn't be further from the truth. And speaking of the truth, all people are surprisingly unique in their own way and there is no such thing as "average". I've been fiddling with this idea for a while and I am putting it to the test in my spare time and so far the results are astonishing: it's far easier to doxx someone online as a consequence of a personal fact that they've publicly shared than some data leak by a private company or even a government institution. Leaks make matters worse, sure but the pile grows exponentially and not linearly(which seems to be what most assume): People get freaked out about their number being posted somewhere online while not realizing that by saying something along the lines of "I studied in London in the early 2010's, then in Edinburgh until 2015" and "I lived in Paris between 2017 and 2019" and someone wants to find their identity, they've willingly helped them narrow down the identity to a handful of people - likely in the very low double digits. Add one more random fact, such as "I have a Volvo xc 70" and you've basically put a pin on yourself on the map.

Most people have probably never considered this. It may sound like a cliche but it's far more important to educate people as well as their children from a very early age about those things than to assume that outsourcing the problem to technical solutions would somehow solve it - it won't.

Re: Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

#26

Post by EMIRELADERO »

CJefferson wrote: post #2

I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but I don't buy that end-to-end encryption will, overall, increase children's safety. I'm happy to see strong evidence one way of the other, but this article is very one-sided. Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communi…

> Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communication with whoever they are talking to is end-to-end encrypted.

How can you do this without compromising anonymity? The inevitable conclusion of this argument is that an ID check will be mandatory in order to enable E2EE messaging, otherwise any child could be instructed to enable it by a bad actor.

Re: Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

#27

Post by egberts1 »

poincaredisk wrote: post #13
bboygravity wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know what's running on Signal's server? Sidenote: Signal is based in the USA. They do not have the benefit of the doubt.

You and GP bring signal into this, but TFA is hosted on simplex.chat blog - the communicator famous for not having user accounts at all, so it trivially fixed the problem GP mentioned.

Simplex shy away from User ID, which means you are giving up something in exchange (notably no message encrypted-at-rest in their server): then the government can access the message contents from Simplex server.

It says so on their website:

"Only client devices store user profiles, contacts and groups; the messages are sent with 2-layer End-to-end encryption."

What it does NOT say is that message content remains encrypted on their server like Signal does.

It is like time, money, resource: pick only two. But in secured communication, that would be personal anonymity, personal privacy, and personal security: only can pick two.

https://simplex.chat/#how-simplex-works

Re: Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

#28

Post by xzjis »

vaylian wrote: post #16
CJefferson wrote: post #2

I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but I don't buy that end-to-end encryption will, overall, increase children's safety. I'm happy to see strong evidence one way of the other, but this article is very one-sided. Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communi…

> it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communication with whoever they are talking to is end-to-end encrypted. This is not purely a technical matter. Children and adolescents want confidential communication just like older people. You might argue, that it is in the best interest of minors to have someone/something look at their private communication to intervene if ne…

>there are much better and more versatile ways to protect the children: Educate them and their parents.

That's exactly it, we should address the root cause of the problem, not its consequences by punishing and threatening to be punished. It's much more effective.

Re: Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

#29

Post by Arainach »

derefr wrote: post #11
CJefferson wrote: post #2

I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but I don't buy that end-to-end encryption will, overall, increase children's safety. I'm happy to see strong evidence one way of the other, but this article is very one-sided. Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communi…

Why does scanning of children's communications need to involve non-E2E-encrypted communication? The parents can just be the admins of their children's devices and tell those devices to capture and report communications before they're encrypted.

Putting aside that children as a group are brilliant and constantly jailbreaking every kind of device management they are subjected to, the vast majority of parents aren't technical enough to understand this problem much less set themselves up as "admins" and the vast majority of those who are technical enough to understand do not have the time. They're already trying to ensure their children are fed, educated, socialized, emotionally supported, and so on.

This is a wonderful example of engineers thinking everything is a technical problem when almost everything is instead an organizational or human problem.

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