The disguised return of EU Chat Control • Hacker News Board

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#311

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

b112 wrote: post #306

Humorist2290 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is probably a reference to the report mentioned in this article from September https://reclaimthenet.org/germany-chat-control-false-reports... According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), 99,375 of the 205,728 reports forwarded by the US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) were not criminally relevant, an error rate of 48.3%. This is a rise from 2023, when the number of false…

I feel this is a good place to add something... I recall a half decade back, there was discussion of the quit rate of employees, maybe Facebook?, due to literal mental trauma from having to look at and validate pedophile flagged images. Understand there is pedophilia, then there's horribly violent, next level abusive pedophilia. I used to work in a department where, adjacently, the RCMP were doing the same. They coul…

Because of this issue, many departments put in much stricter protocols for dealing with this kind of material. Only certain people would be exposed to classify/tag it, and these people would only hold that post of a limited period of time. The burden on those people doesn't change, but it can be diluted to mitigate it somewhat.

Its a real and sad problem, but not one that I think can be fixed with technology. To much is on the line to allow for a false positive from a hallucinating robot to destroy a person(s) life.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#312

Post by throwaway938761 » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 1:37 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #310

rendaw wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the GP math is wrong. But still, is this good? So 14 cases are referred to law enforcement. They catch 7 people doing really terrible things, and they also catch 7 who are innocent. The police are notorious for treating weak signals as strong and forging causes for suspicion, terrorizing suspects, getting them fired from their job, killing their pets, upending their lives, etc. If you ruin as many lives as yo…

Yes, this is good. I urge anyone who thinks otherwise to wade into this arena themselves and see what they find. It is incredibly easy to be on the sidelines and hold an opinion. It is your right to do so. However if even a tiny bit of you is the kind of person who is driven to understand, and to hold opinions based on defensible positions, do your legwork. Personally, I keep an arms length from the child safety side…

The innocent people caught in the net aren't the only victims though. Entire families will be broken by the 50% false positive rate. You can easily end up doing more harm than the abusers with your line of thinking.

Granted, assuming law enforcement is reasonably competent, the false positives shouldn't result in anything other some wasted time for whoever has to look into it...but that's quite the assumption to make.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#313

Post by marginalia_nu » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 1:57 PM UTC

athrowaway3z wrote: post #280

ekianjo wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically a useless document.

Companies like Flock and Clearview have set up gigantic dragnets in the US. I'm not happy with everything the EU does, but to call it useless is to be ignorant of the rest of the world.

It's perfectly sufficient to have laws against that sort of thing. As governments are above the law (in that they can just add new laws that say they can do whatever they want), you need something else. A bill of rights is such a something else.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#314

Post by xcf_seetan » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

How about applying this kind of surveillance to the government? After all we are paying for them to rules us, so why not publish all government, politicians, law enforcement, military messages for everyone to read? Why everybody must be treated as a criminal, because they cant do their job of keeping us safe?

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#315

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 2:03 PM UTC

brigandish wrote: post #291

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s why people still think legal frameworks can meaningfully restrain a state that has already decided not to be restrained. The EU isn't really a state, though. The members are states, but not the EU.

As the saying goes, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” EU law and its constitution have primacy.

Sort of. It's not quite like anything else. The EU has mostly trade and standardization powers, and lots of the other stuff is an outgrowth of that.

But mostly, EU law just sets a baseline, and almost all execution of it is devolved to the member states.

Edit: the EU does not have a constitution but a constitution shaped update of the Treaties. Now, lots of politicians are happy to blame the EU for unpopular stuff, but the council is the national politicians and they basically run the EU.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#316

Post by criley2 » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

tock wrote: post #259

criley2 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes are ~irrelevant to billionaires. When you say "you can't be a billionaire" what you're saying is "you cannot own any significant amount of a large business" because billionaires aren't liquid, their status is based on their assets and primarily their shares in large businesses. I agree that wealth inequality is horrible and taxes on the wealthy should be much higher. But if someone owns 10% of a trillion dollar…

> So what do you do? We should be discussing strategies to tackle this. Not just go "oh lets just accept it". Just how many people have 100B+? Do you see them trying to interfere in governance and elections? Maybe we can have annual wealth taxes. Just like property taxes. There are many ways to tackle this. That's what we should be discussing. Not just giving up. Absurd wealth inequality will cause societal collapse.…

> "Annual wealth taxes"

So, the government steals a percent of private businesses every year? What does the government do with this? Are you suggesting that the government forces business owners to liquidate their own shares to give to the government? So on a long enough time line, no one is allowed to own a business.

> No it isn't. It's taxation. Does the presence of property taxes and inheritance taxes make the west a communist region? Communism is the govt "owning" a company. Some rich guy selling his shares on the stock market to pay his taxes doesn't mean the govt owns the company.

The business is already paying taxes (i.e. property taxes). You're proposing a new tax on top of the existing taxation scheme, an ownership tax that likely requires the owner to reduce their ownership. Imagine if you had to sell 1% of your house every year because "home ownership is unfair". Most middle class folks would never end up owning their home.

Communism is when you're not allowed to own private businesses, and the wealth that is problematic is the ownership of private businesses. Skin this cat however you want, but if you want a skinned cat, the skin has to come off.

Again, I agree that billionaires are bad. I don't think taxation or incentive structures will fix it. I do think that revolution/wars that destroy the oligarchy and reset wealth are the only times in history that the middle and working class truly prosper. It is what it is. In an ideal world, business ownership is broadly spread across employees and wealth and power are shared broadly. But that's not an outcome that is ever achieved without significant force.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#317

Post by some_random » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

pcrh wrote: post #53

The right to privacy is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights, article 8 [0]. It escapes me how politicians can repeatedly attempt to violate this. [0] https://fra.europa.eu/en/law-reference/european-convention-h...

You have no right to privacy from authorities. In fact, you'll find that Europeans have very few actual rights.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#318

Post by avmich » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

yesco wrote: post #160

marginalia_nu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the whole thing is full with these loopholes. Your rights are rights only as long as we wish at some point to add laws that inhibit them.

It's weird how "rights" went from "the government can't do X to you" to "the government can force private actors to do Y (but these rules don't apply to us)."

Maybe it's because rights should be "government CAN do X to you", and whatever isn't listed in rules government CANNOT do?

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#319

Post by mod50ack » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 2:43 PM UTC

realusername wrote: post #284

pcrh wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same in French (obviously), though equally this does not permit mass surveillance: > Article 8 de la Convention européenne de sauvegarde des droits de l'homme et des libertés fondamentales: > Droit au respect de la vie privée et familiale > 1. Toute personne a droit au respect de sa vie privée et familiale, de son domicile et de sa correspondance. > 2. Il ne peut y avoir ingérence d'une autorité publique dan…

I'm talking about the 1948 version which has the following: > Article 12 > Nul ne sera l'objet d'immixtions arbitraires dans sa vie privée, sa famille, son domicile ou sa correspondance, ni d'atteintes à son honneur et à sa réputation. Toute personne a droit à la protection de la loi contre de telles immixtions ou de telles atteintes. And that's it, no other additions.

> arbitraires

That's the key word.

Re: The disguised return of EU Chat Control

#320

Post by Snild » Sat, Nov 15, 2025, 2:54 PM UTC

xcf_seetan wrote: post #314

How about applying this kind of surveillance to the government? After all we are paying for them to rules us, so why not publish all government, politicians, law enforcement, military messages for everyone to read? Why everybody must be treated as a criminal, because they cant do their job of keeping us safe?

We have that in Sweden and Finland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_to_...

The principle says that information is non-confidential by default, rather than the other way around.

We can request almost any information held by government agencies, including copies of communication like email and documents.

One thing that has surprised European acquaintances is the fact that this includes government-held info about individuals, e.g. address and tax returns.