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EU Commission is planning automatic CSAM scanning of private communications

tutanota.com

321–330 of 431 posts

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

#321

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

Good thing that most of the EU government is unelected.

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

#322
post #12

"Potential victims" are not victims. That's where the slippery slope begins.

There was a movie called Minority Report that had a similar premise. Basically they would detect murders before they happened and arrest people moments before the murder took place. At the time of the arrest the potential killer had motive and intent, so that’s how they justified it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(film)?wprov=s...

Good to have brought up that movie, worth a watch (or to see again). Quite odd (or maybe not) that the EU wants to head in that direction, of setting up the near equivalent of their own "Precrime" program. The infallible "algorithm" will stand in for the "Precogs".

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

#323
post #172

Isn't this an insanely stupid idea? Doesn't it open the door to a new type of ransomware - pay up, or we'll flood your devices with CSAM and submit a tip about it?

I keep posting this objection on every single one of these articles.

It is weird how supposedly techno-savvy people can't spot how easy this would be. But I'd think it would look more like an alternative to murder-for-hire when ruining someone else's life and throwing them in jail would be sufficient. Get someone else to pay reasonably big money to actually do it and not just threaten it.

This may have happened already and some middle aged dude caught with CSAM is crying about how he's been framed--only he really has been framed. But nobody believes him, because nobody believes a sex pervert.

It seems like a great way to me to put out a 'hit' on someone because it can be done from across the world without leaving any physical traces, with the actions taken across national borders, and much less likelihood of the cops being able to do anything about it, even if they do detect it and the person winds up going free.

Agencies like the CIA may also be able to exploit this against foreign politicians and public figures they don't like.

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

#324
Ironic that this is coming out of the tutanota people whose product disabled my newly opened account, based on unspecified suspicions, for 48 hours, during which mails sent to it bounced as undeliverable, and only notified me about this fact upon subsequent login.

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

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the EU wants to go through easy to rummage through stuff like email, texts, instant messenger (all easy to go through if unencrypted). I think that's what their warning shot is. Eventually they would like to put spyware in every app/phone and keep tabs on what you're doing. It's the same in America as well. Politician and the police state have no shame when it comes to wanting to take away your privacy "to th…

Seriously, if you start with "I think EU is turning into Sauron",you then can imply everything, you'll be mostly wrong though. > I think that's what their warning shot is These arguments have been in discussion for at least a decade. Why do you think they want to read your email? What purpose could it serve? Do you really think France will accept to put the email of their citizens out in the clear if Germany refuses?…

I think kowtowing to ANY group wanting to rifle through texts/email/anything is a bad idea without some legal principle like a very specific warrant has been issued to do it. What these guys want means that all encryption has to have a backdoor so they can look through you private "papers" at will. Yeah, I don't like that, and no I'm not exaggerating. Otherwise, we wouldn't have agreements between countries like Five Eyes. I just don't understand why everyday people just roll over for government abuse of their privacy.

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>and it would be fairly simple for an expert to dump out the list of things being looked for. If you embed a neural net trained to detect "some" kind of images, I would love to know how one could "dump" the list of things the net is looking for. Basically it's not how it works - the neural net is more or less a black box, you can't tell what kind of things it's looking for by just looking at its contents. You give i…

The hashes are something like a 64x64 pixel representation that can apparently be recovered to a small, very blurry but still recognisable image (when the Apple thing blew up there was a researcher who’d done it with a reimplementation of PhotoDNA from the paper).

Sure, but if you read the article the proposed law by EU specifically mentions detecting brand new and not yet classified CSAM by using machine learning. So it's not just hashes we're talking about here.

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

#327

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…

This seems to imply normalizing scanning of private information between kids. All I see is getting them used to governmental privacy infringement early, so they won't complain about it later as adults. Very sneaky of them. Again it's "to save the children"

To clarify, the sexting part of the proposal[0] is only there to modernize. Loosely translated:

>For example, sexting is no longer punishable if this happens with consent. This is seen as sexual experimentation behavior among youth.

It has nothing to do with scanning private information. It only legalizes what would realistically never appear in court except for twisted revenge cases most of the Dutch shake their heads at (girl sends boyfriend nudes under mutual consent, they break up, now ex-boyfriend tries to accuse her of breaking the law which is technically true, but absurd).

[0]: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/seksuele-misdrijven... (Dutch)

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

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or are they living there for jobs? That’s what I always hear as excuse for people to live there, not that they like dense neighbourhoods. I am old though so my network and (news/social) reading habits might be different.

I like living in a dense city. I can walk almost everywhere, I don't need a car, there's nice parks, things are open later (although not late enough for my preferences sometimes), there's good variety of restaurants, entertainment, art, food, bars, dancing, sports, clubs for nerds, and so on. The outer walls of my condo are made of concrete, I hear less from my neighbors than when I lived in a house. The jobs situati…

Yeah, think that's a healthy attitude. I never really liked living in cities, but I do like visiting them, especially mega ones that are open most of 24/7 (cities that close before 5 am I find utterly boring I noticed and I lived in a few; but people with kids like that or so I heard). Clubs for nerds sounds good; is that some kind of meatspace IRC?

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

#329
My goto solution since Apple CSAM fiasco: 1. Manjaro on office computers. 2. MacOS Catalina with Little Snitch for designers. 3. Air-gapped MacOS Mojave for testing and designers. 4.Limited smartphone usage to banking apps and phone calls. 5. Using dedicated camera for photography, if uploaded - metadata cleaning. 6. Serious offline book, movies, articles archive. 7. No cloud services. NAS only. 8. Limited social media activity, 20 minutes of Twitter, similar usage for Hackernews. 9. No connections to internet without active VPN. 10. Using internet primary for work.

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

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its definitely a complicated and messy idea. Many Americans would essentially only consider a complete change of constitution as a "new government", meanwhile in certain language in parliamentary structures there is a common phrase of "creating a new government" when an election takes place. Neither idea is really wrong, they're just coming from different perspectives. If you're using the same kind of terminology, th…

I know it can sound complicated, but I usually refer to what's written in our Constitution The Constitution establishes the Government of Italy as composed of the President of the Council (Prime Minister) and Ministers. The President of Italy appoints the Prime Minister and, on his proposal, the Ministers that form its cabinet. So it's the combination of PM (Mario Draghi right now) and Ministers, appointed by the hea…

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