I find it somewhat disturbing that this sort of thing is not considered a career killer for politicians.
It's their job and goal in life to hurt the population
More control is the objective.
Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
31–40 of 341 posts
Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
this has more weight: threema is the biggest "alternative" (after whatsapp and telegram) chat app among my peers. There's a sizable non-tech but pro-privacy part of the population that exclusively uses threema. This will be the first time they ever hear of this.
Interesting. Here it had some niche users, but got completely supplanted by signal, which is the clear #2 with the people I know.
Signal had a narrow window when there was some whatsapp scandal going on and signal was weirdly popular for a month or so. Then they announced their crypto bs. And in my bubble it was nuked entirely off the earth as a result.
With Threema I have lots of uncles etc who use it exclusively.
Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
#33Someone is benefitting and it's not 'the children'.
Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
#34A lot of despondency about this. But I think part of why this stuff gets through is that techies are campaigning in the wrong way
Those advocating for it have a visceral pitch: your kids will be in danger if this doesn't pass. Those against are arguing for abstracts, like freedom and privacy. And sure, people should be in favour of those things - but there's a visceral pitch against, and it's not being used
What will happen if this stuff is put in place, and used as claimed? There will be a massive rush of automated "accusations" of child abuse against innocent parents, grandparents, and other relatives. This will result in many families being unnecessarily stressed and disrupted by investigations, and at least some children being removed from innocent families.
Why will this happen? after all, won't the scanning be 100% accurate?
Obviously not. Tech companies don't want to be responsible for this - the scanning won't be optimised for accuracy, it will be optimised to pass the buck as hard as possible[1], because the tech companies don't want to business of taking the blame when some pedophile isn't caught.
Who is the second level of review? Maybe some minimum wage zero-hours subcontractor at Serco or Group 4 Security, or whoever the equivalent of that is in the EU. But that's probably it - once the image has been labelled 'bad' no-one else will want to look at it.
So, even if you are sending a picture of your own child to your own mother, you will have at the very least to have to think about whether it could be mistaken for child abuse by someone you don't know who has about 5 seconds to look at it and is probably from a completely different culture.
Yet none of this has been brought up in the media either by tech companies or by privacy activists.
[1] The other option is that the tech companies abdicate completely and just use some black box from the government to scan every picture. Problems with that left as an exercise...
Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
#35I find it somewhat disturbing that this sort of thing is not considered a career killer for politicians.
In Greece, we recently elected as representatives for the EU Parliament: * a 71 year old lady, with no social media and no public speeches ever. * a guy who used a nickname for his last name, that matched with a military general (who is well known), and many people thought he was the general * a "journalist" that was caught twice talking on live TV, conversing with a pre-recorded video * a convicted criminal It's imp…
Hello neighbor. You will never win the competition for choosing the worst possible politicians as long as Turkey has Erdoğan :)
Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
#36I find it somewhat disturbing that this sort of thing is not considered a career killer for politicians.
In Greece, we recently elected as representatives for the EU Parliament: * a 71 year old lady, with no social media and no public speeches ever. * a guy who used a nickname for his last name, that matched with a military general (who is well known), and many people thought he was the general * a "journalist" that was caught twice talking on live TV, conversing with a pre-recorded video * a convicted criminal It's imp…
Also ->
YouTube prankster voted in as Cyprus MEP - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nnrwr72dqo
Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost nothing is. Local politicians fail upwards to the EU (at least in Germany) or some private job, if they fail at all. Most of the time, you can do what you want, and the voters don’t care.
"and the voters don’t care." Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU? There just has been EU election in germany and the nationalist gained a lot. And none of the big parties otherwise said a clear no to that, so what could I do, except vote a small party against that, but too small to really do something? Voters care. But they see often no point in voting anymore.
> Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU?
Is the EU really a benefit to the people? Or is it a shit pool full of scum bags providing quite some damage to societies?
Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
#38I too instinctively bristle at this kind of legislation. It's likely to be abused, with many false positive that make it more effective at sweeping up innocent people, while the guilty just find workarounds. But all coming on here and saying "ooohh, this is bad, innit!" is not very interesting, and unlikely to prevent it. Why is the EU doing this? Which political groups are supporting and opposing it? Why now? How ar…
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Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
this has more weight: threema is the biggest "alternative" (after whatsapp and telegram) chat app among my peers. There's a sizable non-tech but pro-privacy part of the population that exclusively uses threema. This will be the first time they ever hear of this.
Threema being paid up front makes it harder to adopt for average uses. Signal is great option and wish more would use it.
I wish more people would use something that's not US backed honestly.
Centralisation is a curse.
I don't inherently trust Signal, and you have to because nothing they do is verifiable; I wrote a really hit-and-miss article about this before: https://blog.dijit.sh/i-don-t-trust-signal/
Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now
#40I find it somewhat disturbing that this sort of thing is not considered a career killer for politicians.
Well, people wanted even more alt-right representation in parliament, MEP support for the entire package of policy "Chat Control" is part of is now higher than ever. There is a lot more "for the children" policy coming up.
Yeah, although really no-one of the 'regular people' (well, I have even educated programmer friends saying it's good to catch criminals) care/know (they glaze over when I talk about 'another tech blah') about this, they did vote the people in who like this kind of stuff (and probably are somewhere making $ with it).