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The EU Commission accepts high error rates when checking chats

netzpolitik.org

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

#31

Post by mrtksn »

ho_schi wrote: post #3

The commission does not seek to break encryption Okay. Encryption is not only important to protect private communication, but would also help perpetrators/criminals No. It is there to protect us from perpetrators, criminals and all the people which think they are on the good side. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Authoritarian regimes on our planet always thought they were the "good guys". Encryption i…

Well, encryption is in fact used by offensive military forces too so it definitely can be a part of the "bad guys" arsenal but I don't think this is the real motivation behind the push for breaking encryption.

It's not just EU but UK, USA, China and every single entity that collects intelligence for their goals. They all would love to have encryption braked in their favor because we created vast communication networks with enormous data stored that can be reached at instant but they can't reach those due to encryption.

Consider that you are in charge of defending your community against straight out criminals and foreign influence or actors who have other goals than you do. How amazing would be for you to be able to check out each and every citizen or each and every device relevant to you at click of a button, right? It's the ultimate society debugger, you will be able to do your job so much more easily.

The problem with that is, we as a society, don't have a definitive good or bad or truth or allies or enemies and we constantly change our minds on all these things and this is not a bug but a feature.

Let's say some kind of anomaly happens and the encryption is removed and government officials have total access and none of them are corrupt and they do their jobs perfectly. Instantly you removed progress in the society and everything will stay the way it is, good luck if you are on the wrong side of things because the only way anything changes from now on will be possible only through discussion from within the community of those who happened to be in control when the encryption no longer worked.

I don't want this to happen because I don't live in country where the mainstream policies are aligned with my ideas on how the world should work. What about criminals you say? Well, catch them through police work and other means - it doesn't have to be completely effortless for you to do your job.

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

#32

Post by prlmer »

seper8 wrote: post #6

If this ever gets into production I hope the tech community can come together and work on a system to generate false positives until this system is no longer viable. Let's hope its a typical EU project and will take at least a decade to complete, or better, let's just hope it will outright fail.

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

#33

Post by mayoi »

jand wrote: post #12
seper8 wrote: post #6

If this ever gets into production I hope the tech community can come together and work on a system to generate false positives until this system is no longer viable. Let's hope its a typical EU project and will take at least a decade to complete, or better, let's just hope it will outright fail.

While i get the sentiment, you should check the mentioned penalties for abusing the system (once known) before jumping to action.

I guess everyone should just check the penalties for committing crimes before assuming that crime is real...

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

#34

Post by mayoi »

prlmer wrote: post #32
seper8 wrote: post #6

If this ever gets into production I hope the tech community can come together and work on a system to generate false positives until this system is no longer viable. Let's hope its a typical EU project and will take at least a decade to complete, or better, let's just hope it will outright fail.

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

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

#35

Post by Retr0id »

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?

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

#36

Post by sparsely »

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?

> 10% of all OK images may be falsely flagged, but what about specific categories of images?

The article doesn't say what % of OK images are falsely flagged, only what percent of flagged images are OK.

Agree that subsets might have different stats, but there's 0 information in the featured article about any of that!

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

#37

Post by mayoi »

gloppers wrote: post #24

That old adage " if you've nothing to hide, then you've nothing to fear " is oft berated in these sort of discussions, but it really does apply here. This regulation is for the purposes of criminal investigation into serious harms against children, not for spying on whatever innocuous messages you happen to be sharing with friends and family. The privacy fears are being way overblown for us ordinary people. Paedophil…

No post body was provided.

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

#39

Post by DangerousPie »

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 whole plan a good idea or not is obviously a very different question, but I think it's important to be clear about what this number actually means.

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

#40

Post by tomekn »

This whole debacle reeks of stupidity. The only thing that will happen is that the criminals they are (allegedly) trying to catch will simply move their comms to different channels. What's stopping a sophisticated crime syndicate form simply creating their own app which will have a small enough footprint such that it will fly under the radar?

From the perspective of tech companies, they are being put between a rock and a hard place by simultaneously being asked for more privacy, and also less privacy.

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