I 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 are vendors responding? How does it affect non-EU countries?
There are organizations which are selling AI tools to filter content. For instance, Thorn, a US organization founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, is building such tools and heavily lobbying for Chat Control in EU. "Ashton Kutcher is a tireless advocate."
> But all coming on here and saying "ooohh, this is bad, innit!" is not very interesting, and unlikely to prevent it.
I disagree - this is how the internet can strengthen democracy.
Upvoting and commenting makes this post hit the top of HN and stay there. This makes it visible to many EU citizens who can reach out to their MEP's to ask them to vote against it. Seems a pretty effective strategy to me as someone living in a non-EU country.
Although agree that we should also be discussing the questions you raised.
Complaining is the first step and a necessary one. But complaints need to be turned into critiques and more steps need to be taken.
I'll state that as an American I'm quite unhappy with this as I know the regulations will also affect me and the truth of the matter is that I have a much smaller voice in this matter due to not being a European citizen. I do have additional worry since it was not that long ago which we saw the results of authoritarianism in Europe (though it did result in the strengthening of my country). And my concern is that authoritarianism creeps, often with good intentions but poor foresight. My biggest fear is that we did not learn the great lesson from WW2, in that Germany did not in fact go from good people to the entire country being evil and back to being good people. If we can't understand this process and see how it actually happens (with the details) it will only repeat, led by people that have. But I don't know how to get people to understand subtleties, and that seems like a major issue in a world growing increasingly complex.
They already found out that it is a lobby organization that pushes it for those who sell the products for surveillance. Please google it I am to lazy to search for it. Sorry
My pet made-up theory is that careers aren't really killable like that any more, since Cambridge Analytica.
Before CA, the received wisdom was that if you do something bad, you will need to resign before you are pushed for causing damage to the organisation reputation and therefore electability. This was perhaps borne out with enormous error bars by focus groups and polls asking "would you still vote for X in case of Y".
After CA, and in particular the live social media sentiment data that was gathered around the debacle of the UK Brexit referendum, the data showed that actually egregious misbehaviour did not materially affect sentiments, and perhaps even appealed to a larger proportion of people than believed. For example, the famous "shy Tory" might not show up well in a focus group, but it all hangs out after analysing Facebook's data.
With that data in hand, people started doing things that they would never have dared to do before, knowing that it won't actually harm them, at least in the short run (since this data only shows short term effects).
And that's how we go from resigning over fairly small gaffes to the "screw it, what you gonna do, we know you won't vote for the others, we've seen your data" of today.
Not long ago, calling a woman a bigot on a hot mic was a dreadful PR disaster. Now, you can physically snatch a journalist's phone and it barely registers.
It does, however stack up over time with catastrophic final effects, much like chasing only quarterly figures or always postponing dealing with technical or real debt.
There was a disjunction around the late 90s/early 2000s when the internet got big. That was around the time that the corporate news sources started losing control of the news to more citizen reporter types running podcasts or whatever gets big on social media. What gets called "the narrative" split from being the consensus of journalists to a cacophony of random people who don't form consensuses.
Before that change, a scandal in the papers also meant you had to have lost political favour with the people who owned the media companies, ie, were losing big political battles. You also had no hope of being re-elected through a hostile media because if they didn't carry a favourable message there was no way to communicate with voters. I'd argue people like Jeffery Epstein never really made it to trial or public attention because stories got buried.
Afterwards the better approach is to point and shout "Fake News". There are multiple channels that reach voters and it turns out that the corporate media are actually much more unreliable and unpopular than were previously suspected. A lot more dirty laundry is aired and the Streisand effect takes hold.
CA wasn't the change, it was just one of the first big scandals to happen in the new era.
Yes, and this trend is self-reinforcing since politicians generally do not actually receive any punishment for their bad behavior. At best the party slowly loses voters but that is over much longer timeframes than individual politician's careers - and meanwhile all other parties pull similar shit anyway because the short-term benefits incentivize that.
Truly frightening that these are the people who'll be contributing to the decisions made on the future of the internet for the entire rest of the world.
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.
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.
They ride the wave and find always some excuse. It was fighting the terrorists until a few years ago, now it's children again. Next year could be to help the climate or protect lbtgqi++ rights.
We need to define "politicians" first. I can see your point if "politician career" means "being repeatedly elected" (even though other people pointed out what are the problems in this case). But the EU Commission isn't elected. These people are appointed by some fucked up complicated process. They definitely seem to have pretty good careers, but what are these careers — I wish I knew.
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).
The populace is clueless and/or ignorant, and Brussels has a well earned reputation for being a popular toxic waste dump for unpopular politicians. To give some examples from Germany, we dumped Günther Oettinger and Ursula von der Leyen there in the last two elections, and this year our far-right party managed to place a suspected traitor on the top of their list.
I mean, if you asked many people "is it ok if the government can read some of your chat messages in exchange for catching a bunch of child pornographers," this will be a very popular "yes" vote. People are generally very willing to trade some rights and freedoms for safety. Or don't realize the trade-off they're making.
Can someone explain to me why, over time, democratic states tend to drift into mass surveillance ?
Is it beacuse a lot of people feel unsafe or is it because the people supposed to ensure our security see it as the "easiest" or most effective way to do their job?
Is there so much benefit to having a fuctioning mass surveilance apparatus, and if yes, who benefits of it if not the people for whom these rules for in the first place?
Democracy is a spectrum and it comes in many flavors.
For example nobody voted for von der Leyen, the French voted against the EU referendum in 2005 but the government still went with it, there hasn't been any referendum in France since
> Can someone explain to me why, over time, democratic states tend to drift into mass surveillance ?
Democracy, even a flawed democracy leaves the status quo power structure vulnerable to being changed by popular political action. Mass surveillance allows the existing players to identify any nascent political movements that may eventually grow to threaten them and undermine or destroy these movements before they ever become a threat.
In this case it's not really about mass surveillance. I genuinely do not believe it's the intended purpose (even if it is the actual outcome).
The issue is that Europe is behind in tech; particularly big communication networks (aka: social networks). One key element here is that the amount of taxes paid by the Facebooks and co. is ridiculously low and their importance in the economy is getting bigger and bigger. This causes a significant risk for the future.
Any attempt that we made to combat this on the technological aspect has been a complete failure.
To protect its citizen, Europe uses the biggest weapon at its disposal: regulations. The point is not to impose mass surveillance, nor is it to protect the children; the point is to hurt social networks because they are perceived as a threat (real or not). Hammer them with regulations until it's almost impossible to comply, if possible by implementing conflicting ideas (protect privacy of everyone BUT check every image for child pornography !).
The desired outcome is that: either the social network goes out of Europe, or decides to accept the fines, which more or less corresponds to what Europe believes should have been paid by a fair tax system.
That doesn't make sense. There are 2 versions of chatcontrol:
1. Voluntary chatcontrol (i.e. temporary derogation of the ePrivacy directive)
2. Mandatory chatcontrol (i.e. services must scan private communication once a detection order is issued)
The first version of chatcontrol is currently in effect, but it will expire in a few years. It was introduced, because social media (like facebook) was already scanning private communication to find CSAM and then someone pointed out that this is illegal in the EU and thus the ePrivacy directive was sabotaged to allow the scanning of private communication.
Facebook wanted to have a legal basis for the scanning of private communication. This does not hurt non-EU social networks, it helps them.
They don’t need mass surveillance to crush Facebook/tiktok in the EU, so I don’t see how you can draw this conclusion. They can easily regulate those two (and other)entities out of existence. Just make it illegal for anyone under 21 to use them and require everything to be kid friendly (no porn, no violence, no addictive advertising, etc) and they will be useless to virtually everyone except the elderly and that’s not where the money is. So I feel that this 100% about surveillance for the police state to comb through everyone’s lives looking for crimes to prosecute. There are so many laws and regulations I suspect most of us break multiple ones a day without realizing it.
Domestic incumbents (social networks or messenger apps) would need to jump through the same hoops. So, I would say that, as a whole, the goal is to get people to self-sensor and to fear the establishment.
If the EU wished more competition by domestic companies, they could simply pass a law restricting the income tax by member states to not go over 50% of earned income. In my current jurisdiction, a lowly IT worker can easily pay a 66% tax rate, with 54% being paid as nominal taxes and the rest going as employer taxes. Unless you are self-employed, in which case you will get to pay your 66% with no smoke curtains in the middle.
"But the pedos" is a guaranteed way to lure voters.
Besides, there is a laaaarge amount of influential, rich and well connected people like Ashton Kutcher/Thorn willing to profit off of it. They're selling out our freedoms for personal gain.
The issue is the rise of mass surveillance tech, which makes it too easy. Also, tech creates new threats (including terror plots, protecting children etc) which drive demand for the surveillance.
Technology is evil. Specifically, the Internet is evil.
It's why it's got such a uniquely rich potential for dystopia, why all news is always bad news, why it's always getting worse.
Technology, as it progresses, is the enabling of power. So you'll find more and more power exerted over you because people can't resist. You'll have to assert power of your own to counter it, like switching to Linux or using a VPN. Or torrenting a media to escape the oppressive DRM placed upon it. But it's essentially a war you've found yourself enlisted in. If you've got the chops to fight in it, you're lucky; most don't.
I single out the Internet because it connects us with oppressors and makes us reliant on them more intimately than ever before. AI will be able to extend that oppression even in an air gapped environment because now the oppressor's intent can be packaged up and installed on the machine like never before -- no connection required.
And, in the limit,
I think it all ends with gray goo, Daybreak style.
All police organizations will want complete control. It’s up to democracies to fight back. I think politicians are noticing the public are vulnerable to fear mongering about kids and crime and the “big bad cloud” and using that to get more power for their police apparatus, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a democracy or totalitarian state, governments want more power, all the time, every time. Except in a democracy you can fight back by voting, publishing, contacting representatives. It is getting harder but it’s still possible. Such things aren’t possible in Russia or China without Massive Upheaval and the dictator fearing loss of control, but otherwise no big deal for most changes in the laws.
> democratic states tend to drift into mass surveillance
I am not saying this is false, but think about the inverse: are there non-democratic states never drifting into mass surveillance? Maybe it is a symptom of a developed, high-trust society.
Which doesn't make mass surveillance a good thing. I'm just contemplating whether it's even possible to turn out different.
> And EU professionals like lawyers, journalists, and physicians could no longer uphold their duty to confidentiality online.
This is the point that needs to be hammered home. Allowing governments access to everyone's confidential information is a massive security disaster waiting to happen because bad actor's will target this backdoor.
PGP encryption should be taught in school. Ingrained.
Data privacy used to be trampled on with the fear of ‘terrorism’, but the Americans blasted the airwaves with the word so much that it diluted the word to the point it instills zero fear.
Now the new words of the times to trample on privacy is CSAM.
And like utter fools, the public fall for the same crap time and time and time again.
The truth is, the world will always be shit and have shit people in it. Those shit people will do shit things.
It’s a fight over your soul now. And the AI is going to love love love everything it has on every single person on the planet. I can’t wait for the AI to come for us all - we are collectively just awful (and I believe we the west are probably more awful to humanity than even the Chinese, Israel or the Russians, and that is saying something).
Please give examples of how the authoritarian, repressive, conformity-demanding CCP is less awful and soul destroying than Western democracy, as flawed as it is.
No need to compare to China, the German authorities can be repressive, they do search your home if you call an official a penis. Home searches are done casually because the judicative branch is overworked, neglects its responsibility and just waves such demands through. You lose your electronics and maybe your property gets damaged. Of course for a developer your electronics might be quite valuable as well.
With a mechanism like this, this probably will increase further, apart of course for the unjust violation of privacy and even dignity. This is a law that contradicts the constitution very directly.
Also, this is policy that was not brought through democracy. It was created by European Commissioners that only have a very low democratic legitimacy for far reaching policies like this.
It would be a disaster for the EU and all its citizens if this comes through and everyone will loose.
Want to check how many died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria between 2001 and now as a direct consequence of Western military action, versus how many people the PLA killed in foreign interventions in the same period?
Hint: the former - hundreds of thousands, the latter - zero
> and I believe we the west are probably more awful to humanity than even the Chinese, Israel or the Russians, and that is saying something
This is a wild POV to hold and one I'm pretty disappointed to hear on HN. You'd really prefer a world of Russian hegemony over NATO? My cousins in Ukraine would be shocked to hear otherwise smart people cheering on a regime which the rest of the civilized world has broadly condemned.
You serious? I nearly cried watching what was happening in Ukraine early in 2022.
You are making bad assumptions here.
But if you want to put it into perspective… think about what is happening in Gaza. Now compare to Ukraine. Russia has plenty of missiles and by comparison (even while absolutely awful) have shown much more restraint. I don’t support them at all though!
> Besides, there’s no way of really knowing whether Chat Control would actually be (or remain) limited to CSAM.
I definitely agree with the article here. Probably after Chat Control will be implemented for CSAM this would act as a gateway towards using this tehnology for other things.
I am curious whether chat control will extend to mail or other means of online comunication, if it will be implemented ofc(hopefully not).
I’ll probably start communicating with my friends over phone more either way, I don’t want my conversations to be monitored 24/7.
> I’ll probably start communicating with my friends over phone more either way...
Talking to people is great. I write science fiction for a hobby. In my stories, when two people want to have a private conversation to discuss some economic barter that can be construed as tax evasion, they take off all their clothing and go swimming to a beach with noisy waves. But there is always that lingering fear about if anybody surreptitiously got a microphone implanted during their latest root canal treatment...
Truth be told, I'm a very unimaginative bloke, because in my current jurisdiction banks are already forced to report on their customers, and in my previous one, the government had a decided phobia of cell-phones and attributed to computer printers in the hands of civilians the same dangers of an independent printing press.
today's voice recognition tools are pretty good, look at meta's recent results. I wouldn't be that sure that phone discussions will not be monitored in some future. It's likely the other way - phone service providers are few in nr, it could be easy to force the change on them
I don’t know about Europe but the US has been scanning trunk lines of domestic and international calls for decades looking for keywords and actually have decades of archived conversations that AI will make it all the more feasible to comb through and look for thought crimes.
The wording in the current draft seems to indicate that it applies to "providers of hosting services and providers of publicly available interpersonal communications services". So unless this includes ISPs, I wonder if that means a decentralized P2P service is not covered.
You should scan on the device before it goes on the network. P2P networking or not, the app should include a scanner.
Even if you use an open-source clone without scanner, your contacts most likely will use an app with builtin scanner. Your communications will be scanned on their end.
At that point I'm wondering why we don't also open and scan regular mail at the post office before delivery.
I also wonder how it applies to Matrix, which is encrypted and technically decentralized.
However most users will be using the matrix.org homeserver, which makes it effectively centralized. Though I can still create my own homeserver that talks to matrix.org.
Would matrix.org be forced to offer scanning / a backdoor on the homeserver?
Or would they be forced to add something to the official apps, which is pretty ineffective as there are many client apps.
All in all this proposal seems like a complete mess.
Readit News
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 are vendors responding? How does it affect non-EU countries?
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
"Oui oui!"
I disagree - this is how the internet can strengthen democracy.
Upvoting and commenting makes this post hit the top of HN and stay there. This makes it visible to many EU citizens who can reach out to their MEP's to ask them to vote against it. Seems a pretty effective strategy to me as someone living in a non-EU country.
Although agree that we should also be discussing the questions you raised.
I'll state that as an American I'm quite unhappy with this as I know the regulations will also affect me and the truth of the matter is that I have a much smaller voice in this matter due to not being a European citizen. I do have additional worry since it was not that long ago which we saw the results of authoritarianism in Europe (though it did result in the strengthening of my country). And my concern is that authoritarianism creeps, often with good intentions but poor foresight. My biggest fear is that we did not learn the great lesson from WW2, in that Germany did not in fact go from good people to the entire country being evil and back to being good people. If we can't understand this process and see how it actually happens (with the details) it will only repeat, led by people that have. But I don't know how to get people to understand subtleties, and that seems like a major issue in a world growing increasingly complex.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Edit: here it is
https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...
Deleted Comment
Before CA, the received wisdom was that if you do something bad, you will need to resign before you are pushed for causing damage to the organisation reputation and therefore electability. This was perhaps borne out with enormous error bars by focus groups and polls asking "would you still vote for X in case of Y".
After CA, and in particular the live social media sentiment data that was gathered around the debacle of the UK Brexit referendum, the data showed that actually egregious misbehaviour did not materially affect sentiments, and perhaps even appealed to a larger proportion of people than believed. For example, the famous "shy Tory" might not show up well in a focus group, but it all hangs out after analysing Facebook's data.
With that data in hand, people started doing things that they would never have dared to do before, knowing that it won't actually harm them, at least in the short run (since this data only shows short term effects).
And that's how we go from resigning over fairly small gaffes to the "screw it, what you gonna do, we know you won't vote for the others, we've seen your data" of today.
Not long ago, calling a woman a bigot on a hot mic was a dreadful PR disaster. Now, you can physically snatch a journalist's phone and it barely registers.
It does, however stack up over time with catastrophic final effects, much like chasing only quarterly figures or always postponing dealing with technical or real debt.
Before that change, a scandal in the papers also meant you had to have lost political favour with the people who owned the media companies, ie, were losing big political battles. You also had no hope of being re-elected through a hostile media because if they didn't carry a favourable message there was no way to communicate with voters. I'd argue people like Jeffery Epstein never really made it to trial or public attention because stories got buried.
Afterwards the better approach is to point and shout "Fake News". There are multiple channels that reach voters and it turns out that the corporate media are actually much more unreliable and unpopular than were previously suspected. A lot more dirty laundry is aired and the Streisand effect takes hold.
CA wasn't the change, it was just one of the first big scandals to happen in the new era.
* 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 impressive to manage to fail as a politician.
YouTube prankster voted in as Cyprus MEP - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nnrwr72dqo
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.
But then there are the „Wahlhelfer“ who openly proud themselves in Twitter to invalidate votes for parties they disagree with.
This is democracy?
- https://id-party.eu/program/ (ID Party Official Site)
- https://idgroup.eu/news/online-censorship-is-a-threat-to-eur... (ID Group News)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy (Wikipedia Overview)
- https://id-party.eu/declaration-of-antwerp/ (ID Party Official Site)
The ID group is opposed to EU-wide surveillance measures, and promises to protecting individual privacy and national sovereignty.
Won't you take her back and make her Minister for Castles or something,
Dead Comment
Is it beacuse a lot of people feel unsafe or is it because the people supposed to ensure our security see it as the "easiest" or most effective way to do their job?
Is there so much benefit to having a fuctioning mass surveilance apparatus, and if yes, who benefits of it if not the people for whom these rules for in the first place?
Democracy is a spectrum and it comes in many flavors.
For example nobody voted for von der Leyen, the French voted against the EU referendum in 2005 but the government still went with it, there hasn't been any referendum in France since
Democracy, even a flawed democracy leaves the status quo power structure vulnerable to being changed by popular political action. Mass surveillance allows the existing players to identify any nascent political movements that may eventually grow to threaten them and undermine or destroy these movements before they ever become a threat.
The issue is that Europe is behind in tech; particularly big communication networks (aka: social networks). One key element here is that the amount of taxes paid by the Facebooks and co. is ridiculously low and their importance in the economy is getting bigger and bigger. This causes a significant risk for the future.
Any attempt that we made to combat this on the technological aspect has been a complete failure.
To protect its citizen, Europe uses the biggest weapon at its disposal: regulations. The point is not to impose mass surveillance, nor is it to protect the children; the point is to hurt social networks because they are perceived as a threat (real or not). Hammer them with regulations until it's almost impossible to comply, if possible by implementing conflicting ideas (protect privacy of everyone BUT check every image for child pornography !).
The desired outcome is that: either the social network goes out of Europe, or decides to accept the fines, which more or less corresponds to what Europe believes should have been paid by a fair tax system.
Expect the exact same thing to happen with AI.
1. Voluntary chatcontrol (i.e. temporary derogation of the ePrivacy directive)
2. Mandatory chatcontrol (i.e. services must scan private communication once a detection order is issued)
The first version of chatcontrol is currently in effect, but it will expire in a few years. It was introduced, because social media (like facebook) was already scanning private communication to find CSAM and then someone pointed out that this is illegal in the EU and thus the ePrivacy directive was sabotaged to allow the scanning of private communication.
Facebook wanted to have a legal basis for the scanning of private communication. This does not hurt non-EU social networks, it helps them.
If the EU wished more competition by domestic companies, they could simply pass a law restricting the income tax by member states to not go over 50% of earned income. In my current jurisdiction, a lowly IT worker can easily pay a 66% tax rate, with 54% being paid as nominal taxes and the rest going as employer taxes. Unless you are self-employed, in which case you will get to pay your 66% with no smoke curtains in the middle.
Besides, there is a laaaarge amount of influential, rich and well connected people like Ashton Kutcher/Thorn willing to profit off of it. They're selling out our freedoms for personal gain.
Tech doesn't create terrorism or child abuse.
Technology is evil. Specifically, the Internet is evil.
It's why it's got such a uniquely rich potential for dystopia, why all news is always bad news, why it's always getting worse.
Technology, as it progresses, is the enabling of power. So you'll find more and more power exerted over you because people can't resist. You'll have to assert power of your own to counter it, like switching to Linux or using a VPN. Or torrenting a media to escape the oppressive DRM placed upon it. But it's essentially a war you've found yourself enlisted in. If you've got the chops to fight in it, you're lucky; most don't.
I single out the Internet because it connects us with oppressors and makes us reliant on them more intimately than ever before. AI will be able to extend that oppression even in an air gapped environment because now the oppressor's intent can be packaged up and installed on the machine like never before -- no connection required.
And, in the limit, I think it all ends with gray goo, Daybreak style.
I am not saying this is false, but think about the inverse: are there non-democratic states never drifting into mass surveillance? Maybe it is a symptom of a developed, high-trust society.
Which doesn't make mass surveillance a good thing. I'm just contemplating whether it's even possible to turn out different.
This is the point that needs to be hammered home. Allowing governments access to everyone's confidential information is a massive security disaster waiting to happen because bad actor's will target this backdoor.
Data privacy used to be trampled on with the fear of ‘terrorism’, but the Americans blasted the airwaves with the word so much that it diluted the word to the point it instills zero fear.
Now the new words of the times to trample on privacy is CSAM.
And like utter fools, the public fall for the same crap time and time and time again.
The truth is, the world will always be shit and have shit people in it. Those shit people will do shit things.
It’s a fight over your soul now. And the AI is going to love love love everything it has on every single person on the planet. I can’t wait for the AI to come for us all - we are collectively just awful (and I believe we the west are probably more awful to humanity than even the Chinese, Israel or the Russians, and that is saying something).
I am mad.
With a mechanism like this, this probably will increase further, apart of course for the unjust violation of privacy and even dignity. This is a law that contradicts the constitution very directly.
Also, this is policy that was not brought through democracy. It was created by European Commissioners that only have a very low democratic legitimacy for far reaching policies like this.
It would be a disaster for the EU and all its citizens if this comes through and everyone will loose.
Hint: the former - hundreds of thousands, the latter - zero
Literally soul destroying. As in life destroying.
Meta data kills people. Now it’s moving way further than meta data..
not other countless nations that have been enslaved, colonized, invaded, subjugated, stripped in the name of democracy and religion.
Russia, CCP etc are horrible too - but let us not forget history.
The Global South Remembers.
This is a wild POV to hold and one I'm pretty disappointed to hear on HN. You'd really prefer a world of Russian hegemony over NATO? My cousins in Ukraine would be shocked to hear otherwise smart people cheering on a regime which the rest of the civilized world has broadly condemned.
You are making bad assumptions here.
But if you want to put it into perspective… think about what is happening in Gaza. Now compare to Ukraine. Russia has plenty of missiles and by comparison (even while absolutely awful) have shown much more restraint. I don’t support them at all though!
I definitely agree with the article here. Probably after Chat Control will be implemented for CSAM this would act as a gateway towards using this tehnology for other things.
I am curious whether chat control will extend to mail or other means of online comunication, if it will be implemented ofc(hopefully not).
I’ll probably start communicating with my friends over phone more either way, I don’t want my conversations to be monitored 24/7.
Talking to people is great. I write science fiction for a hobby. In my stories, when two people want to have a private conversation to discuss some economic barter that can be construed as tax evasion, they take off all their clothing and go swimming to a beach with noisy waves. But there is always that lingering fear about if anybody surreptitiously got a microphone implanted during their latest root canal treatment...
Truth be told, I'm a very unimaginative bloke, because in my current jurisdiction banks are already forced to report on their customers, and in my previous one, the government had a decided phobia of cell-phones and attributed to computer printers in the hands of civilians the same dangers of an independent printing press.
Ironically the pervs will still be using WhatsApp, and just put their CSAM in a password-protected zip file before sending.
Even if you use an open-source clone without scanner, your contacts most likely will use an app with builtin scanner. Your communications will be scanned on their end.
At that point I'm wondering why we don't also open and scan regular mail at the post office before delivery.
However most users will be using the matrix.org homeserver, which makes it effectively centralized. Though I can still create my own homeserver that talks to matrix.org.
Would matrix.org be forced to offer scanning / a backdoor on the homeserver? Or would they be forced to add something to the official apps, which is pretty ineffective as there are many client apps.
All in all this proposal seems like a complete mess.