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

EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption

patrick-breyer.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 47 posts

Re: EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption

#31

Post by bmicraft »

moogly wrote: post #18

Hmm, call me a cynic but this sounds a bit too good to be true. What's the catch?

The "worst" thing about this from my understanding is that for now this is just an agreement.

From the bottom of the article:

> The EU Parliament’s civil liberties committee is due to confirm the agreement on 13 November.

> 20 November 2023: Announcement in plenary (likely no vote on substance)

> 4 December 2023: Envisaged Adoption of Partial General Approach by EU Council (tbc)

> after 2024 EU elections: Envisaged trilogue negotiations of the final text of the legislation between Commission, Parliament and Council, as well as adoption of the result

Re: EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption

#32

Post by g-b-r »

bmicraft wrote: post #30
g-b-r wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my knowledge EU Regulations are simply laws that overrule local EU countries' laws, so whether it's possible or not for local laws to be more extreme only depends on such laws being at odds with what the Regulation prescribes (but I'm not a lawyer and only looked into that years ago).

From what I've been told how it actually works is that eu law doesn't apply directly to member states, but member states are required to amend their laws to be at least as strict as eu laws on all matters.

There's not a single type of EU laws, there are "regulations" and "directives".

Regulations are complete laws applicable immediately across the EU as they stand, the states are required to amend any conflicting law but the regulations already automatically prevail on any conflicting local law.

Directives instead need to be transposed into local law by each state individually, and can leave many details to the individual implementations.

Re: EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption

#33

Post by besse »

pmontra wrote: post #25

> Security by design: In order to protect young people from grooming, internet services and apps shall be secure by design and default. It must be possible to block and report other users. Only at the request of the user should he or she be publicly addressable and see messages or pictures of other users. Users should be asked for confirmation before sending contact details or nude pictures. Potential perpetrators an…

I don't understand. Why would anyone care about circumventing a "Are you sure?" dialog?

Re: EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption

#34

Post by kdwikzncba »

SahAssar wrote: post #16
attah_ wrote: post #15

On the one hand this makes me very happy that democracy can actually work things out (and quite well at that)... but on the other hand i'm still horrified people seriously tried to push the original proposal. Not sure what i feel summing up the two.

My takeaway is that the EU as a whole is somewhat responsive to public feedback but it is still too far removed from the people and our will.

Unlike our direct representatives, who are very responsive /s

Re: EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption

#36

Post by hyperman1 »

ls612 wrote: post #26
SenAnder wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this differ from the status quo? I would assume targeted surveillance, without requiring 3rd parties sabotage the security of their products, is already a legal law enforcement procedure?

It doesn’t really. Much like the UK, the EU appears to have blinked when faced with the loss of both WhatsApp and iMessage.

Not really. This was expected. The commision tends to align with big business friendly proposals. The parliament tends to align with inhabitants, but has less power. Proposals go back and forth.

What makes this story special is how blatantly bribable the commission must be to make them spit out this proposal.

Re: EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption

#37

Post by pmontra »

besse wrote: post #33
pmontra wrote: post #25

> Security by design: In order to protect young people from grooming, internet services and apps shall be secure by design and default. It must be possible to block and report other users. Only at the request of the user should he or she be publicly addressable and see messages or pictures of other users. Users should be asked for confirmation before sending contact details or nude pictures. Potential perpetrators an…

I don't understand. Why would anyone care about circumventing a "Are you sure?" dialog?

There are many ways to share contact details. One is to use an app provided mechanism, which can ask confirmation about sending and receiving contacts. Another one is to just type them into a message. The confirmation of the intention to send is implicit but no confirmation is possible at the receiving end: they read the message and get the contact, willing or unwilling. All they can do is delete it before remembering it and report the other party. There is a provision about reporting unwanted interactions.

About circumvention, one could think about a way to detect contact details in messages. There are several problems with that.

1. If it warns the sender, the sender will try another way until the obfuscated contact passes unnoticed (text, image, vocal, link, whatever.)

2. If it automatically reports the sender there will be many false positives, some due to copy and paste, keyboard autocompletion, etc.

3. We're back to automatic spying of people.

Re: EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption

#38

Post by raxxorraxor »

attah_ wrote: post #15

On the one hand this makes me very happy that democracy can actually work things out (and quite well at that)... but on the other hand i'm still horrified people seriously tried to push the original proposal. Not sure what i feel summing up the two.

I am still not sure that this is not a very foul compromise. It remains to be seen. For example age verification for certain site with adult content.

This is a typical strategy and people fall for it every time because they have not reflected on their own position.

This isn't a win for democracy at all, it is still pushed top down by the EU. They still push for unique internet IDs, even if they say they protect anonymous access for now.

Re: EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption

#39

Post by raxxorraxor »

9dev wrote: post #27
pmontra wrote: post #25

> Security by design: In order to protect young people from grooming, internet services and apps shall be secure by design and default. It must be possible to block and report other users. Only at the request of the user should he or she be publicly addressable and see messages or pictures of other users. Users should be asked for confirmation before sending contact details or nude pictures. Potential perpetrators an…

> Asking for "confirmation before sending contact details" is feasible but easily circumvented as is my mail is joe at example dot com. I’m pretty confident this is a task where LLMs will shine.

Not if you want to scan the image. Locally that would still need quite a lot of processing power.

Re: EU parliament agreement to remove chat control and safeguard secure encryption

#40

Post by raxxorraxor »

richarme wrote: post #29
SahAssar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway is that the EU as a whole is somewhat responsive to public feedback but it is still too far removed from the people and our will.

I think you're probably right, but sometimes I wonder if a bit of distance can be a good thing. Perhaps a slight distance can make populism less viable while still being effective at representing the low-pass filtered will of the people in a sense. And perhaps the lower public mindshare might help insulate against people with ambitions but not people's best interest at heart. Or this is crazy talk, not sure which one…

That isn't a good development at all. Problem is that this distance isn't realized for large interest groups. This bill is an example. It is still on the menu despite numerous lobbying attempts have been made public.

The EU shifted power from voters to larger groups with particular interests. Those groups have the resources to address people in Brussels, while voters have more or less no voice or impact.

This is a structural problem.

Post reply on HN