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

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To be clear here — and maybe this is a miscommunication in this conversation — when I'm talking about monitoring the online activity of "children", I'm talking about e.g. six-year-olds. Kids who are at a young-enough age that they don't yet have a mental schema of the world that includes a term for "online sexual predators." (And yes, six-year-olds these days have smartphones. Or at least they do if they take the bus to school, do any organized sports, live back and forth between divorced parents, or one of any number of other things that create the possibility of an emergency where they're stranded somewhere and need to be able to reach you. Pay-phones don't exist any more, remember?)

I don't think monitoring the online activity of a six-year-old is a particularly difficult problem, because it's not adversarial in the way that monitoring older minors would be be. Six-year-olds really just don't have that many things they want to do online; even the ones who are heavily absorbed into screens, are mostly passively consuming content or playing games. They have no impulse to create social-media accounts and profiles describing themselves in the way teenagers do. (There's a clear through-line from going through puberty and unlocking the "hormone production" part of the human tech-tree, to wanting to be seen as socially impressive, to oversharing on social networks.)

Meanwhile, I don't think parents should bother trying to monitor their teenagers' devices at all. For two reasons:

1. If you have a healthy communication channel with them, and you explain what the risks of engaging with strangers online are — and if they also have no reason to actively seek out adult attention (i.e. if you aren't neglectful/abusive) — then they will do perfectly well protecting themselves. Their mental schema of the world does include a term for "online sexual predators" — trust me, it does, even if you have never personally explained the concept. They might have ill-considered reactions to such threats — e.g. deleting messages that gross them out instead of saving them as evidence, or capitulating to (what are to you obviously bluffed) threats of blackmail — but these are exactly the sort of practical micro-skills that make up the modern version of "educating and socializing" someone.

2. It's just a losing game to try. Unless you literally never let a teenager leave your sight, they can work around literally any restrictions you try to impose on them. And not just by nerding it up with jailbreaking or what-have-you. If you give a teenager a locked-up/monitored phone, their most likely response will be to treat that phone as a decoy, and to ask a friend at school — one without helicopter parents — for an old used phone of theirs (everybody has one) to secrete away and use as their real phone. Then, the first time they get a spare $20 in cash, they'll walk into a convenience store and get a prepaid SIM card for that phone, so that they can ensure it never touches your house's internet. There is literally nothing you can do to stop this (that wouldn't make their life worse than that of most maximum-security prisoners.)

Parenting rule 1? Show up. The thing overworked parents don't have? Time.

Hence my entire point- if you don't have the time for kids, its not on society to fix absenteeism. If you're not spending time with your kids, they're exposed to others, so the overworked or inattentive? Their children are the victims. Those are the ones who should have parents in their lives paying attention to them and reinforcing good values.

Society can't be forced to babysit everyone who had kids but couldn't commit the time to it . It takes a village - and we will pick you and your kids up when you trip -- but if you spend 20 years not raising your kid, it aint our fault.

The logic here is very simple:

1) Any scanning messages of children and their parents means providing access to them, effectively removing the protection provided by the encryption.

2) If these messages are accessible to any algorithm or systems, however secure, there is no way to guarantee that the bad actors will be prevented from accessing these messages - it's only the question of time until this information is leaked.

3) If these messages are accessible to bad actors, it will enable more grooming - because they will be used to train language models to more effectively manipulate children and other people.

So while politicians can engage in their wishful and magical thinking about some wonderful technology that will allow, what they call, a "lawful access" but at the same time will somehow prevent unlawful access by bad actors, everybody with a bit of technical knowledge understands that it is simply impossible - it's either e2e encrypted and nobody other than the communicating parties can access it, or it is not - and then anybody with resources can access it, including bad actors.

That's why they want to scan messages of everybody other than themselves: https://www.eureporter.co/business/data/mass-surveillance-da...

It was never about protecting children - it is simply about eradicating the privacy as we know it, and preventing any dissent from being formed, and criminalising private conversations in the same way free speech is being criminalised. These ideas are not new - it's just now that they try to weaponise "let's protect the children" narrative to achieve it.

The only way to protect children and vulnerable people online is to reduce their discoverability on online platforms, not to expose their communications to enable more efficient grooming - which would be the effect of the scanning.

The people screaming think of the children are almost always the ones I want nowhere near children.