Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

tutanota.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 431 posts

Re: EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

#161

Post by pantalaimon »

Tade0 wrote: post #130
pantalaimon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It's the most efficient use of resources and allows for some great cultural and public infrastructure to exist that just doesn't make sense without density.

Is efficiency for the sake of efficiency worth it though? There's a second order effect I observed which I feel isn't discussed enough: when it's assumed that you can only walk/cycle or perhaps take the bus in an area, suddenly there's an additional premium imposed on space. The net result is accelerated gentrification. Anecdata: just about anyone I know from my generation was priced out of those walkable districts w…

That argument is ridiculous. So dense neighborhoods are popular, therefore prices are rising because more people want to live in a dense neighborhood.

The solution to that is not "let's build more undesirable neighborhoods so prices are not increasing" but to change zoning regulations so more dense neighborhoods can be build to satisfy demand!

Re: EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

#162

Post by ajsnigrutin »

marsRoverDev wrote: post #117
Freak_NL wrote: post #47

It's scary, because CSAM (child sexual abuse material) is very, very broad, and quite vague in its definition¹. My three year old son stayed with my parents for a week, and he was being taught to swim in their swimming pool. Of course, I get sent pictures and clips of his progress by a proud grandma, and of course, him being a toddler, he felt swimming trunks to be completely optional (and of course, they are at his…

My understanding of this technology was it was usually a hash or fingerprint of some form of the material, to be compared against a database of hashes of known-bad material. I doubt EU countries have the infrastructure or budget to run models across everything, no?

The problem with hashes is, that you cannot prove what the original image was without actually getting caught with csam.

So basically, a whistleblower takes photos of some very incriminating documents, someone gets accused of eg. money laundering, hashes of those images get added to the "csam" database, and you find the first person (via metadata) who had that image on their phone.

Also, in some more repressive countries, an image of a famous cartoon bear photoshopped to look like some president can be added, and all the people who look/have/download images (memes) like that, can get put on a "list".

Re: EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

#163

Post by pc86 »

londons_explore wrote: post #124
zosima wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, as this is not about child sex abuse anyway. The legislators know, from experience, that it's hard to argue against measures to protect children from predators, and so they are free to launch controversial and unacceptable measures. Once in place, it will be extended to other purposes. The same as always.

The thing is, with current 'privacy-protecting scanner' designs, the scanner is running on every end users device, and it would be fairly simple for an expert to dump out the list of things being looked for. That in turn makes such a system far less useful to intelligence services and authoritarian regimes. You don't want to tell your target that you're looking for them and which keywords not to use! I wonder if this…

More like this is part 50,000 of an ∞-part plan to give the government more and more power and oversight.

Re: EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

#164

Post by VancouverMan »

hef19898 wrote: post #56
baisq wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grateful why? They served to restrict our rights.

Because EU recogniced certifcates made travel within the EU possible and, besides some funny rules for border crossings, almost pain free. Just imagine going from Geany to France would require to get your German vaccination certificate recognised by the French first, as one example.

When one set of government-imposed policies artificially inhibits travel, another set of government-imposed policies that artificially adds exceptions to that first set of policies shouldn't be seen as providing salvation.

"Travel within the EU" would have been "possible" and "pain free" if the various governments had just not imposed any travel restrictions in the first place.

Re: EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

#165

Post by 8345570934 »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #120
chinathrow wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, everything encrypted at rest will be a must.

Then encryption becomes evidence of guilt, unless you give up the key so they can search it to make sure you're not guilty.

I don't think that works in countries with a jury system. I don't have anything illegal on my computers, but I would never give up my passwords to anyone working for the government. I think the odds that at least one person who is like me (or can at least understand that mindset) will be on any given jury is pretty good.

Re: EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

#166

Post by deergomoo »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #53
xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #20

I don't think this proposal is quite enough, we can do better to protect the children. The homes of the people who champion this proposal should be thoroughly searched for child abuse materials every week . Naturally, their personal electronic devices should be taken for analysis. I understand this may cause them some inconvenience, but think of the children!

Sorry, privacy from government surveillance applies only to our elected officials, not to you and me. /s

No need for the /s tag, that’s exactly how it works in a lot of places.

Here in the UK, the so-called “Snooper’s Charter” that was passed in 2016 allows bulk data collection and warrantless access to that data…unless you’re a member of parliament.

Re: EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

#167

Post by varispeed »

b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote: post #142

I feel that in the near future, we'll have a campaign against E2EE with the intensity of the current campaign against guns in the US

If you look into it, these things are lobbied by globalists like WEF. They also happen to run multiple governments around the world, so these things are being developed in parallel for 2030 Great Reset agenda. It has different pace in different places due to cultural differences i.e. some countries wouldn't care about ban of E2EE while other would take it to the streets. But they have a strategy for the latter scenario as well. They'll pretend to give up and then piggy back bits and pieces through other unrelated legislation until it is fully in place.

Re: EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

#168

Post by Freak_NL »

belter wrote: post #143
Freak_NL wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how it will be different this time. The past decade has seen a bunch of failed projects that used algorithms to do the heavy lifting, and justice and redress for those involved has not even been served in all cases. The Dutch Toeslagenaffaire¹ was a massive failure of using discriminating algorithms to judge if tax payers were defrauding the state (most of those marked as fraudsters were innocent and many…

To call Dutch Toeslagenaffaire a failure of discriminating algorithms, when the main criteria was: Manually identify innocents based if they were born outside the Netherlands or married to somebody born outside the Netherlands, or if they were born in the Netherlands, had Dutch nationality but grand parents born outside the Netherlands....Is a very strange characterization.

I think you may have misread my comment. The algorithms didn't fail; they did exactly what they were programmed to do. The failure lay in the use of these algorithms; i.e., such algorithms should never have been developed and subsequently used to put people on a blacklist.

Re: EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

#169

Post by tluyben2 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #136
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny because in this regard, The Netherlands is actually trying to do better and change the laws to allow mutually consenting teens to do this stuff (still tentative) and punish blackmail, prostitution (edit: of minors), minor-adult sexual interaction etc. Our general mentality also seems to be a lot more lax and supportive of kids being victims of their own mistakes rather than going "yeah, that's illegal, let…

It probably helps that we were complaining about and even making fun of[0] our government for using child pornography as an excuse for pushing through draconian populist laws a decade ago already. We may just happen to have a little head-start here basically. Edit: for the non-Dutch, the link goes to an article by the Dutch equivalent of The Onion and the headline says "Opstelten [our minister of Security and Justice…

You need awareness that things most people don’t understand fully are absurd. Humour can be a tool for that.

Re: EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

#170

Post by peoplefromibiza »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #102
stef25 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give some EU specific examples that can be considered representative and not huge outliers? Shit happens everywhere but where am I in Europe if anything there's a lack of law enforcement in the sense that prison terms always seem to be considered too low, people with sentences under X months don't actually go to jail because of overcrowding, police is constantly frustrated that people they pick off the street…

The starting comment gave you an example to start off with. The Netherlands, Toeslagenaffaire. You can't go telling "yeah we really care about innocent people" when you let an algorithm wreak havoc producing false positives and then take ages to fix it while the families are still dealing with the aftermath. That's the opposite, caring for true positives despite the potential false positives produced. I'd also ask yo…

> Toeslagenaffaire

it was about fraud.

And it happened in the Netherlands, which aren't exactly the cleanest of the countries (just check their ties with drug cartels money [1]), so it's Netherlanders that should be worried, not EU citizens.

It happens all the time, I don't know anymore how many wrongful tax bills I have received over the past 30 years, you just show the documents that prove you're in the right (if you are) and that's about it.

We pay accountants for a reason.

Lawyers are still free in my country if you can't afford one, event though it's very hard go to prison for tax evasion, at least not in all the European countries I know, even less likely for undue child benefits.

[1] Money laundering is a growing problem in the Netherlands, with estimates suggesting that around €16 billion in illegal funds is laundered there every year — money derived from a range of criminal activities, including drug trafficking, sexual exploitation and extortion

Post reply on HN