Fascinating to watch.
(Downvoted, as expected. The hypocrisy on this site is absolutely adorable.)
[Confirmed]
https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...
how do you figure that? the freedom of opinion is explicitly enshrined in the german constitution for example. there are limitations, but these are very specific and not arbitrary.
gemany is in fact one of the countries the provides the most protection for your opinion world wide, as long as that opinion is not based on obvious falsehoods (like holocaust denial), or stirs up hatred against a group of people. you can however criticize others and at this point germany provides even more protection than the US.
> Last year, Andy Grote, a city senator responsible for public safety and the police in Hamburg, broke the local social distancing rules — which he was in charge of enforcing — by hosting a small election party in a downtown bar.
> After Mr. Grote later made remarks admonishing others for hosting parties during the pandemic, a Twitter user wrote: “Du bist so 1 Pimmel” (“You are such a penis”).
> Three months later, six police officers raided the house of the man who had posted the insult, looking for his electronic devices. The incident caused an uproar.
...
> In response to a message by [politician] Mr. Jurca criticizing Muslims, Mr. Mai posted a link to a picture of the mural [saying “Du bist so 1 Pimmel”].
> Several weeks later, four police officers pounded on Mr. Mai’s door at 6 a.m. with a warrant to confiscate his electronics. Mr. Jurca had filed a police report claiming the link to the photo was an insult.
in germany that is covered under insult against the honor and dignity of an individual. i don't know about this case, but this is generally only prosecuted when the insulted asks for it, and in most cases is a civil matter. that the incident caused an uproar shows that the response this case is an example of overreach, but overreach happens everywhere, and is an issue in itself. he question here is, is the risk for overreach more dangerous than removing the law/protection. this is certainly debatable.
It is only if your words are likely to promptly cause someone to commit violence that you can be prosecuted for it.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230329-french-woman-...
Open jew hate in Europe hasn't been this elevated since WWII.
Opposition to genocide or to Israel is not anti-Semitism.
That's just not true. Germany has banned slogans in favour of Palestinian freedom.
What's allowed is government-sanctioned gathering, which is the opposite of freedom of speech.
do you have any references?
and what do you mean by "government-sanctioned"? reality is that any kind of large public demonstration requires registration and is subject to permission. the question is whether permission is granted to all groups equally, or whether certain groups are getting limited. if that is what you mean then we would have to look at actual statistics. demonstrations in favor of palestina certainly did happen.
Staatsräson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#Restrict...
> and what do you mean by "government-sanctioned"? reality is that any kind of large public demonstration requires registration and is subject to permission.
In Germany. That's not true in the majority of the democratic world and is not what any reasonable person would call freedom of expression. Nothing that requires permission is a right and civil rights don't require permission.
> demonstrations in favor of palestina certainly did happen.
And the protestors have faced consequences both immediate and in long-tail harassment from the German State.
for the rest, i can't comment on your claims without knowing more details about them
just because something was possible to happen during covid does not mean that it is possible to happen otherwise. comparably what is happening in the US now is also exceptional and we have yet to see if that becomes the new normal.
btw, it turns out i was wrong, you don't even need permission, you just need to announce the demonstration. there can be restrictions, and in specific circumstances a demonstration can be disallowed. but by default all you need to do is make an announcement towards the appropriate institutions.
https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1191189.index-der-repressi...
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/berlin-demonstrationen-g...
the first is a left wing publication, but the second is quite conservative.
i have to admit that what they describe is much worse than i imagined. :-(
you are right it certainly looks a lot like suppression of legitimate protests and support of palestine being deliberately misinterpreted as antisemitism.
Would what last few episodes of South Park be legal if they were made by Germans and targeted German politicians? Probably not?
> The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
>On Thursday, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) upheld her 2011 conviction for “disparagement of religious precepts,” a crime in Austria. The facts of what E.S. did are not in dispute. She held “seminars” in which she presented her view that Muhammad was indeed a child molester. Dominant Islamic traditions hold that Muhammad’s third wife, Aisha, was 6 at the time of their marriage and 9 at its consummation. Muhammad was in his early 50s. The Austrian woman repeated these claims, and the Austrian court ruled that she had to pay 480 euros or spend 60 days in the slammer. The ECHR ruled that Austria had not violated her rights.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...
What makes you say that? A lot of it was heavily impacted by industry, who were by far the biggest contributors during the drafting process.
> And anything but full trust of government also wouldn’t fit with chat control.
I agree with this, but chat control isn't a top-down proposal. It's based on a solid grassroots movement aiming to combat CSAM. Personally I think it's misguided, but there is a _lot_ of public support for online regulation to stem the endless cases of CSAM.
It's a real blind-spot of HN and devs to miss this, as if we don't find ways to effectively end CSAM online, stronger less-targeting regulation like the proposed Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse is inevitable>
This is why having the structure of fundamental civil rights, like in the US constitution, is important. I’m surprised the EU doesn’t seem to have such protections for free speech and privacy and against warrantless surveillance.
This is exactly what I think about it: https://youtu.be/J07wReeRF7Y?si=_VfrNiGRnG-_7dHX
If anything censorship and extensive government oversight of peoples lives in EU and UK is far less controversial so there isn’t much of a push back. As you can see every time this comes up on HN where people in the EU defend it.
They are controversial with the public. They are not controversial within the government.
With certain subsets of the public sure.
Similar response to the “give your passport to shady company” act in the U.K - the majority of the public support it.
what we are seeing is that thanks to social media, more discourse is public. which leads to more prosecutions. that is not a regression. that stuff has always been prosecuted. and they go against hate speech, not wrong think.
Threats are something different
I think we’re far beyond hate speech being thought crime. It also means you can’t be honest about your reasons or viewpoint, thereby poisoning the public debate.
if that is not what you are talking about then we will have to look at he actual numbers being pointed out and the message they come with and the response to that.
While I think the Vance meme reflects very poorly on my country, it is always advisable to remember that you have very limited rights in every country while crossing the border and that it best not to piss off the officers. Travel StackExchange is filled with Q&A’s about how to what to do when the customs officials of various rich countries apply their discretion to deny entry, often for reasons even more petty than having a meme.
American exceptionalism is crazy. US is one of the more abusive countries, not some civilized safe haven of individual liberties.
The only thing it should reflect poorly on is reporters who ran with this fake story for clicks.
That has never happened.
I agree with your other points. There is this though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#European_Uni...
As an example of one of those points, the US right to privacy was long considered so broad that it served as the _foundation of the right to abortion_ in the US for decades! By contrast, to pick an EU example, the Dutch right to privacy is so weak that it is quite literally written into the Dutch constitution as “except as limited by law”; in other words, nearly worthless.
To compare them by presence of a Wikipedia page is beyond ridiculous.
Comparing privacy laws by example is beyond ridiculous. And there are big cultural differences what "privacy" entails.
Your address and phone number are publicly available with a Google search. I've been stalked and had someone show up at my house after moving (and I have zero social media presence) because, for some reason, my personal info was all online and easily found by googling my name.
People can take a video of you, shame you for some random thing, and have your face and name known to millions by the end of the day.
The NSA can access all your online data and share it with whoever they want. Companies do it on their behalf as well. Cops can dig through your car just by saying it smells funny.
A right to privacy somehow was construed as the right to an abortion. But the right to privacy never meant you have the right to keep anything private. In some other countries, you can easily have your data taken down from public view online and sue (and win against) people who violate that right. That's an uphill battle in the US.
Everyone has the same freedom to use their resources to maximise that freedoms to help with where the fiat meets the nose.
I'm not arguing for any previous arguments here, just want to argue that "might makes right" is a very dangerous system.
Strawman-ing: It sounds like the argument is "might implies right because you must have done something right to get that money"
There's a lot wrong with that. You didn't earn the money often, because inheritance. And we're assuming the "right" things you did to earn that money for capitalism maps somehow to "right" things for humanity, which obviously isn't a direct 1-1.
And imagine that logic flipped: "Less might makes less right" -> "less might implies less right because you must have done something wrong to not have money". Like, say that to a 5 year old, poor descendent of slaves.
But again, I'm strawman-ing. Just wanted to get that out there.
individual countries, such as germany do have these protections.
we should stick to actual fact and issue here which is that these tools are bad for human rights NOW. not some mythic pandemic is bad bogeyman
How's that structure working out in upholding fundamental civil rights in the USA?
1. Everyone shall have the right to the inviolability of private life, personal and family secrets, the protection of honour and good name.
2. Everyone shall have the right to privacy of correspondence, of telephone conversations, postal, telegraph and other messages. Limitations of this right shall be allowed only by court decision.
And yet, they have the SORM and SORM-2 laws.
Which constitution are you talking about? The one that includes the House of Congress' right to militia to defend the constitution...or the one without that article?
Lately, the constitution of the US is as much worth as toilet paper, because the Trump administration does everything to exploit it using the "invasion excuse".
In Europe, there is the EU charta of fundamental human rights. If they are violated, laws can be fought above country level.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=celex:12...
Birth rates are so low that a lot of people don't even have kids. Why should we preference other people's children to a total invasion of our privacy? Shouldn't those parents mind their own offspring?
Stop putting god and other people's children in my life. That's none of the government's business.
This is very naive worldview.
Stop imposing religion, lifestyle, judgment. Live and let live.
What people do with their own lives is none of anybody else's business.
I am pretty sure he is aware that the default is rather intrusive - but that doesn't mean that is the right default.
What people do with their own lives is none of anybody else's business.
One of the main characteristics of the society is that its members take business in what other people do with their own lives.
Saying that it shouldn't be the case is not a proposal for a different society, but for abolishing it altogether, and thus naive.
That is your definition of societey, but one I consider close to totalitarian. And yeah, sadly it is the standard, but there are societies that stick together, so each member has better chances of living their own live and not so each members lives the live that the others force them to live.
Saying other people may not interfer uninvited in my life is not the same as saying people may not care about me.
I care about other people and interfer in their life, because in the case of my kids, they cannot sustain on their own and they want me as their parent. So there is consent in general about it.
But I am not telling my neibghors that they must wear a warm jacket when it is cold.
(Or that they may not consume porn, to not go to hell)
There is a slight difference between offering help for example and forcing someone to do things in a different way, no matter how well intentioned.
Poverty and bad parenting is the problem, not the Internet.
> it's communities obligation to raise them.
I'd favor taxing bad parents instead of taxing the broader society.
If you don't want your kids seeing content you disagree with, don't give them access. It's a parent's responsibility.
I find it hard to believe that this is the top priority.
> Those who want privacy will usually find it.
Increasingly impossible. Privacy is evaporating.
Coupled with the increasing amounts of censorship, freedom of speech is disappearing too.
The next step is to leverage these tools to control the population. It's already happening.
Right now these systems are being used to coerce powerful politicians and business leaders. It's a trap that becomes a blunt instrument.
One day in the not too distant future you'll have to sign in with your government photo ID to make queries or posts online. If you say something "bad", the government will fine you and limit your social mobility. Your jobs, your opportunities, your money will all be suspended, subject to your pending social rehabilitation.
The only way to stop that is to shut it down now.
Sorry that the kiddies might see boobies. Maybe mom and dad need to limit smartphone access or install filters.
If we're being honest with ourselves, we'd crack down on all the rampant sex trafficking in Roblox. But we know that protecting kids isn't the real reason these things are being developed.
However, the continued existence of society requires other people's children, so maybe it's a pretty important investment?
Does it really require knee-capping the internet and privacy though?
Is this really the pressing issue for society?
News flash: every country in the world has an Epstein. Even Epstein has been replaced and a new guy is doing his work. Or does anybody really believe that child abuse among elites in the US and globally has suddenly stopped when Epstein was suicided?
Edit: looks like it exists, and is called Briar.
You can also send encrypted messages over any other medium. You don't need the messenger app to encrypt your messages for you.
One of the common arguments that PGP is bad is that it's "inevitable" that someone will send a message in cleartext, defeating the whole purpose of encrypting your messages. I don't understand this. The fact that this is possible to do is obviously an artifact of the idea that the user should be unable to tell whether the messages they send and receive are encrypted or not. Do the encryption and decryption yourself, and this is not a mistake it's possible to make. Don't confuse the encryption, which is something you do, with the delivery, which is something the channel does. The point of encryption is that the channel can't be trusted!
This is a rare case where it's centralized in practice and yet the option to do your own thing hasn't been removed from the relevant software.
Why? It can easily be the case that that traffic is observable by outside parties. You'd still need to encrypt your communication.
Connecting to the DNS server "securely" doesn't really get you anything except some DOS resistance.
$ dig +short @<trusted_server> TXT <encrypted_content>.
<encrypted_content_back>TLDR: That sounds like it is some kind or grift.
In all seriousness, google the Sidetree Protocol. Daniel Bruchner promoted it at Microsoft. And now we can even do zk-rollups too.
Where was I? Oh yes, some kind of grift!
If I know Marisa's public key and Marisa knows Omar's public key, she can sign a message to me saying, "Omar's public key hash is c2ecc3b9b9eb94dcafe228f8d23b1e798597d526358177c95effa6bc0ded3a35". I can then use that key hash to authenticate messages from "Marisa's Omar". If she gives Omar mine too, he and I can set up a private channel without further involving Marisa.
Hopefully we aren't just talking to Marisa's MitM proxy. If other mutuals also know him as "Omar" then I can ask them for his key too, and if I get the same response, I can have more confidence that Marisa isn't playing that trick on us.
Never total confidence, though. You need some way to bootstrap a non-MitMed connection; no evidence can ever prove conclusively that you aren't a Boltzmann brain floating in the post-heat-death void, or Descartes being tricked by his evil demon that controls all his perceptions, or Neo in the Matrix.
But meeting up with one of your friends in person once to exchange either public keys or a shared secret, even before you start using the system, can go a long way to ensuring that you are all actually enjoying privacy.
What's nearly impossible is to make it easy and popular among "normal users". Onboarding would be pretty involved. Adding your friends to the contact list would require jumping through a number of hoops. Having several sessions open (phone and laptop, typically) would not be trivially easy, and synchronizing between them would not be very easy, or automatic. Also, forget about push notifications.
It might be far easier to run an instance of Matrix, or whatever Jabber server, etc, on a private host, with full disk encryption, and only accessible via Wireaguard. It's not hard to set up fully automatically from an app; see how Amnezia Proxy does that.
It, of course, will have a special node (the server), but it's definitely not a public service, and it cannot be encountered by accident. It of course would be limited only to people you would invite. Should be enough for family, friends, a small project community, and other such limited circles. It would not require much tech savvy to set up.
But a grand social media kind of network, like FB or Twitter, can't be run this way, because the UX friction would inevitably be too high for a lay person to care.
I suppose only public services, advertised for new users, are the target of the "chat control" directive. You can't join pseudonymously. But joining my VPN-based chat server would require being my acquaintance; should I ask an ID from a person I met at a pub? If so, should I ask their ID before I engage in a small talk with them in the pub?
Do all of your acquaintances even use VPNs? Because 97,56% of mine don’t. So it's not about you and your friends.
But lets assume for a moment that it's about you and your friends... If this law goes through, what’s to stop them from pushing through a series of follow-up laws forcing every VPN provider include backdoors? Who’s going to stop them? Why stop them? By then, the public will have already given in. No one will care if you or your friends are sentenced to 25 years for using a “non-compliant” (read: secure) VPN. Do you have _something to hide_?
In five years, any provider without a backdoor could easily be branded as “insecure.” We’re already living in a world where words often mean the exact opposite of what they should. Why would this be any different? And from my PoV, why take the risk? Children need safe ways to communicate as much as adults.
If you live in one of the authoritarian countries and it pretends to be a democracy to a sufficient extent that voting can actually change things, try doing that. If not, your options are pretty much "apply for the passport" or "sharpen your weapons".
https://chatiwi.com/ seems to be the only real e2e encrypted chat without installling an app (can check the network and source code as it’s just JavaScript)
https://briarproject.org/ and https://tox.chat/ requires to install an app and doesn’t work on iOS.
Briar seems discontinued
“Latest News
AUGUST 31, 2023
Briar Desktop 0.6.0-beta released - blogs“
The cliché about how you should not approach political problems with technical solutions is recited all the time in these threads, but nobody ever presents evidence for this claim. It seems like a meme that is disproportionately useful for those who are confident in their abilities to win any political contest.
You can also go to jail for any of the above, should your particular government authority decide to throw the book at you.
Technical capability is necessary, but rarely sufficient.
It's instructive to read the I2P threat model, https://geti2p.net/en/docs/how/threat-model, as it details a number of potential attacks within reach of a large corporate or state-level adversary
We've tried the political solutions for so long, but this thing just keeps coming back. We have to put our lives and day jobs on hold to push back against this, while the authoritarian camp's agenda is carried by people for whom advancing it is their day job. Therefore it costs them nothing to try over and over again, and they only need to succeed once.
I mean, we enjoy workers rights only after decades of violent protests and many deaths, and yet they are still constantly threatened, because its is a nature of power and politics.
But pro-privacy people consider writing a petition a peak of political struggle, and when it fails it is over for them.
There is no "Eureaucracy", Council decides, countries may or may not implement.
https://commission.europa.eu/law/application-eu-law/implemen...
I think that people are no mentioning enough that there is a specific country:
DENMARK
which is leading this effort. Not saying that there aren't plenty of EU bureaucrats who support Chat Control but this is not primarily some "top-down" EU thing. Its a specific subset of countries trying to impose their dystopian ideas on the entire EU.
If the EU parliament and court of justice are the main institutions that can stop this if countries like Germany etc. just rollover.
This is what people say when they're afraid that technological solutions would actually work.
Technologies have a network effect. If the rest of the world is using a technology which is resistant to censorship or surveillance, any given country will have a harder time banning it, and those technologies defend against governments that violate privacy rights in secret even when the law prohibits them from doing it.
Build privacy into every internet standard and protocol. Make it seven layers deep with no single point of compromise. Make attempts to break it an exercise in futility because it's built so thick into so many things that stripping even a piece of it back out would break the whole world and still not compromise the security of the system.
In my opinion, federated is the sweet spot: you do have to trust the server with your account management, but that server can easily be yours, or one you ethically align with, and through it, you will be able to talk with anyone on the network.
P2P sounds great on the surface but in a mobile-first messenging world, that comes with practical tradeoffs in bandwidth and battery consumption, unless you offload discovery and push to trusted servers, at which point you are back to federation with more steps.
Don't you think that it makes them obvious high-value targets? I mean, that's not even like this profusely pragmatic take has no precedent in the real world: the Snowden revelations showed that all major tech companies were in bed with the NSA to spy extrajudicially on everyone. It's a leap of optimism to think they would "fight legally for its own interest in protecting its customers".
Then, compare that to the low-scale/low-value/hobbyist/residential service providers. How high do you think the chances are for a malicious state-actor to "corrupt" many service operators without it widely being known and publicly dealt with? There's also a deniability dimension to this: XMPP uses OMEMO as a zero-knowledge encryption scheme: whatever the users are doing is none of the operator's business, and the choice of encryption scheme and implementation is purely a client-side affair, so now you are no longer dealing with "reluctant" operators, but potentially millions of end-users using strong encryption. And that is assuming the server is operating in the open, but nothing prevents service operators from offering it over tor (with very little impact on the end-user-side), further raising the bar for the malicious state actor.
like what's happening????
You can run a perfectly fine website with zero cookie banners if you simply don’t track your users and don’t expose them to third parties that do track them.
Hence, all websites implementing cookie banners are the culprits here, not the GDPR.
See, for instance: https://www.info.gouv.fr
Which you can see when you click on "personalise" in the cookie banner.
That's why GitHub reneged on their "no cookies policy" for example: they got taken over by shitty people with shitty tech: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/no-cookie-for...
It doesn't
> when you go to gdpr.eu and see the cookie banner at the bottom.
Imagine if you also read why they have it
Yes because that's tracking.
Cookie banners are the result of a different piece of legislation, the ePrivacy directive. Have you read that one too?
What about all the latest judicial actions regarding data transfers to 3rd parties that have gone back and forth due to ongoing legal cases? Legislation is totally irrelevant without the context of the latest judicial precedent.
Did you read the entirely of the schrems decisions and the analysis of what that means for using or offering any technology services? Having read GDPR is irrelevant when one day Google analytics is okay to use and the next day it's not due to one court case.
What about the latest data transfer agreements between the US and EU that invalidated the use of standard contractual clauses, and the above prior Schrems decisions? You've had years at this point.
Do you think it’s good to insult and assume bad faith from your fellow internet commenters about a topic you actually don't understand yourself?
The huge obnoxious cookie banners that everyone pretends are due to GDPR are neither due to GDPR nor due to ePrivacy.
It's the industry's unashamed deliberate sabotage of GDPR
My flower shop down the street that has a cookie banner on their Wix website is secretly trying to undermine the government.
It couldn't possibly be that the largely unaccountable central planners in the EU's technocratic maze of a government designed a dumb piece of legislation.
Who said anything about secret? They are doing it all in the open.
> My flower shop down the street that has a cookie banner on their Wix website is secretly trying to undermine the government.
Oh, your flower shop only sells you flowers. The 1421 "partners" on their website however are really glad that they tricked clueless people to include their "GDPR-compliant privacy-preserving" solutions.
> It couldn't possibly be that the largely unaccountable central planners in the EU's technocratic maze of a government got something wrong.
GDPR doesn't require huge obnoxious banners.
ePrivacy doesn't require huge obnoxious banners.
Industry: let's create huge obnoxious banners with all sorts of dark patterns to trick people into "consent" through innocent inconspicuous tool vendors like Interactive Advertising Bureau, and blame GDPR for requiring them.
Poor, poor sweet innocent companies. It's GDPR making them collect and keep your precise geolocation for 12 years across thousands of partners who care about your privacy: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
While your "evil data broker malicious compliance conspiracy" narrative is a popular one, especially on this website, that doesn't make it true and you've offered zero facts to support it either.
I've dealt directly with multiple companies in regards to this legislation, and know exactly why we made the decisions we did based on the legal advice given in each instance.
But I will not argue further. You want this conspiracy narrative to be true as it plugs into the tapestry of religious narratives that form your identity. Any facts or logic I can offer against this are no match.
However, could you not agree that moving forward, a centralized browser-based setting is the better solution for all parties involved?
Please write to me the relevant part of the legislation that require a full screen cookie banner that requires you to manually click "no" on each of the 1000+ "partners".
> you've offered zero facts to support it either.
Ah yes, and you've provided a lot of support to your "cookie banners as we see them implemented by literal ad business industry groups are the result of the legislation"
> and know exactly why we made the decisions we did based on the legal advice given in each instance.
Oh, I do, too. The legal council is "since you insist on using fifteen different marketing tools each relying on tracking, we have to include these banners developed by the advertising and tracking industry to cover our assess".
> You want this conspiracy narrative
Once again: it's not a conspiracy theory. It's literally done in the open.
> could you not agree that moving forward, a centralized browser-based setting is the better solution for all parties involved?
GDPR has been around for 9 years now.
Somehow, world's largest advertising and user tracking company that incidentally makes the world's most popular browser came up with exactly zero proposals to do that.
In the same time they have come up with at least three to keep tricking people into tracking. The latest one was literally "how to build a more private web? by turning on tracking" https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1664682689591377923 ("no thanks" in those screenshots turns off data sharing and tracking)
But yes do tell me how this blatant open flaunting of user privacy is "conspiracy thinking".
Edit: also please tell me whether "we're creating a user profile on you, collect device identifiers and precise geolocation information, and storing that data for 12 years" is conspiracy thinking and the direct result of GDPR?
I can block coockies using simple addons, which is WAY lower effort than clicking through a deliberate dark-pattern that is different on EVERY website (or using complex addons with lookup tables for every website).
You can't realistically block fingerprinting without serious effort, and you can't block your IP without using a VPN (which causes a bunch of other problems with sites not serving you).
On the other hand, between those two, it arguably is worse, because we now live in worst of both worlds - we still get a ton of stalking but we now have those cookie banners on top of that.
That law has been pretty successful to the point where there have been debates in the US about adopting similar laws.
The common US media company interpretation to declare their websites an abusive UX disaster zone and put their contempt and complete disregard for their main product (users) on full display is entirely on them and their sleazy lawyers trying to find ways where they can still do their sleazy business. This is made worse by incompetent web designers deciding that this is apparently "the way things should be done" without questioning that. Most cookie banners are just the result of their (mis)interpretation of the law, lazy copying of some shitty website they once saw, and the perceived need to provide lots of legal ass coverage for what under GDPR is flat out just not allowed at all.
Worse, the jury is actually still out on whether the highly misleading language, dark patterns, etc. are actually not illegal in themselves. They might very well be. Lots of companies got some really bad advice regarding GDPR. And some EU companies have actually been fined for doing it wrong.
The only problem with GDPR is the lack of serious enforcement against data abusers and their political adverts (“cookie banners”)
The correct analogy would be California’s toxic substance regulations.
They’re vaguely worded and enforcement is applied randomly based on whatever company is getting bad press at the time. So virtually everything sold in California carries a sticker saying essentially that “this product may cause birth defects.”
Even companies selling products that don’t contain any of these chemicals do so, out of fear of the asymmetric power wielded by the state.
Do a majority of train passengers jump the ticket barriers because they are afraid they might get fined billions of euros if they don’t?
When everybody is using it wrong, the problem isn’t “everybody.” The problem is your design.
Cookie consent should be a centralized browser based setting and nothing more. And the default should be some middle ground compromise that both the most privacy obsessed people AND businesses are not happy with.
I run an extremely simple static website with some JavaScript that lets the user keep track of their state between visits. I have no way to access their cookie, and nothing on the website sends data to me (in fact, can't, since it's a static site running on Cloudflare pages). I never really thought about whether or not I need to add a cookie banner, I just... Didn't.
Legally though... Do I need to?
They might have gone so far to have paid for an implementation but it didn't work (like the EU search engine, cloud or whatever) because they are really incompetent.
So now the solution is to do it in the open, just write a dystopian law and force it through the fake parliament. Our only hope now is the practical implementation of ChatControl will also be in practice ineffective.
We are not really living in 1984 or Brave New World, in the EU we are in the 1985 movie Brazil.
Also ChatControl is something being pushed by Denmark and other ideologically similar countries not necessarily the EU itself as such.
I remember reading their names being blacked out.
So if one messed up person likes that stuff, I guess they might aim towards working there?
Atos btw is the company that leads in receiving money to construct Europe's virtual security infrastructure.
But the proposal was ultimately supported by a substantial majority in parliament, led by the christians, socialists. liberals and greens.
It's a clown show, that "French Big Tech company" Atos stock price went from 10000 to 40 euros in 25 years [0] and is now being sold into pieces because it has 5B debt [1] and is hopeless . I heard him talk once on youtube he is a total moron.
> Atos btw is the company that leads in receiving money to construct Europe's virtual security infrastructure.
Great if those type of people are in charge there is nothing to worry about. The only downside is the Internet might get slower in Europe.
At the end EU citizen might just be told to put the EU in CC of every messages you send, invited to every chat group, and tagged on every social media posts. If you don't you go to prison.
I mean during Covid the french gov mandated them to print and fill a new form every time they took their dog out to pee. So that is not far fetch.
- [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ATO.PA/
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atos#Financial_difficulties
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/270...
What's telling is the fact that they never targeted the U.S. and U.S. policy-makers EVER, despite being mostly Washington guys with lended tech credibility of SF VC's.
Yes because its Denmark, other countries are mainly just tagging along. I mean we can and should blame lobbyists and such as well but 90% of the problem are the politicians and bureaucrats and the politicians listening to them.
Considering the endurance and BS justifications they brought up for so long tells me, there is a is a coordinated effort behind the scenes going on for decades now.
Dissmissing it with incompetence, like "EU logic" is naive, imo.
Unless it's just the US and NSA again actually somehow having trouble with bypassing encryption? Like just push the EU to do some more spying that the US/NSA can then use to see more? I find this somewhat hard to believe since in my mind the NSA is on every US server and can probably just get unencrypted everything from spyware (the OS itself) on all end-points.
Maybe governments/humans simply eventually naturally pivot to power grabbing and this was going to happen all along everywhere?
It's also not an EU-only thing. It's been happening all over the west, partners of the US and even outside of the west: UK, Australia, Colombia, Mexico, the Koreas, China, Russia, etc.
Any other ideas?
So our parties are drooling at the idea of extending surveillance by EU directive so they can point fingers at the EU instead of risking losing votes.
It's no surprise to me, then, that in the document leaked to Wired in 2023[1], our country's position was the most extreme:
> In our view, it would be desirable to legislatively prevent EU-based service providers from implementing end-to-end encryption.
There may have been external lobbying, but it wasn't necessary.
[1]: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/26/leaked-document-shows-sp...
It's an open conspiracy among the global ruling class, including people and organizations collaborating at places like the World Economic Forum and Bilderberg meetings. *Adjusts tin-foil hat.*
The interests of the rich and powerful are aligned to coordinate an international effort for more surveillance of the public, control of information flow and communication. It's part of the rising tide of authoritarianism and frankly fascism.
Some cases are much more benign. Like the police, only seeing their need for more privacy invasions to achive their goals, meeting a tumbling elected politician with the need to pose as tough on crime. Both sides ignore anything beyong their horizon. Here, you have good old incompetence, esp on the politicians side. Pair that again with the populus feeling the need, that something drastical has to be done and you would have an alternative explanation.
As sad as it sounds, but a fascistic government, comming out of a democracy is not a failure of democracy. Many people dont care about big topics, correlations and history repeating itself. They are willing to sacrifice rights, piece by piece, others have fought died for. Besides a lack of governmental transparency, this ignorance, small and large scale, and its todays normalization are the problems i see here.
I cant help it, but i realized first hand (as i assume, many others did too) that this ignorance is often more than just a small mistakem done by individuals. Today, i see it as a cognitive deficiency.
Take one extreme for example, flat earthers. There are many simple physical experiments or celestial observations one could do, to conclude, that the earth is a sphere, but not for them. Confronting FEs with contradictions will only lead to reactance (ad hoc rejection), no matter how polite or enduring you are or striking your arguments are. I know this first hand. If you are lucky, you might encounter and open state of mind that struggles with the cognitive dissonance, you have induced, but only for a short time. Having lasting effects on some strongly biased mind resembles something like a long term therapy: an open mind / willingness for therapy and regular confrontig sessions. If all those self proclaimed critical thinkers were able, to not only change their minds on a whim but would actively seek contradictions in their believes on their own, the world would be a much better place. Can you tell me any historical atrocity commited by societies, where some believe about a superior truth or some absolute good/evil was not at the very core of it? I cant.
The same biased reasoning about a superior truth can be found in modern politics today. In essence, its people rallying around some vague group identity or against some other group (in/out group characteristics) and irrationally attack/discard $symbol criticism as if its fight-or-flight time because the apes survival dependeds of the tribe. MAGA accolytes could realize them selfs, that 1st gen. mexican migrants have a significant lower crime rate and thus crime emerges from within the US, but they dont. It doesnt cross their mind 0, that someone willing to migrate is also willing to work for a stable future. Instead, they rally arround "mass deportation" and will post hoc rationalize any atrocity of their supreme leader.
After Nazi-germany lost the war, the tribe was shattered and it was tabu to speak about or do $symbol in public. For a brief moment in time, it looked like the populus could actually learn, that history is not a loop but even though most AFD accolytes agree on the evil atrocities of that time, they still fall for the nostalgic unity strength and role model of it, they would like to see "tribe great again" and absolute evil being dealt with and ignore anything beyong, including your well-meaning, factual arguments. So why even try?
I cant help it, but i think changing the message to a primarily emotional one might be a better strategy. I am not saying we should ignore factual arguments but since disgust towards out groups can be such a strong source of bias, why not use it against them and make xenophobia disgusting again, like its 1945.
I like Gavin Newsoms recent trolling and hope he doesnt degrade into simple insults only. He does, what is neede, wresling with a pig and i think we all should convey the same derogatory message, while the communication channels are still unfiltered. The other side does not want to have a truley open discourse, they want us to be silent.
I know, this can be seen as inflammatory and counter productive but i think the polite approach is even more futile.
Now you know about my ideas :)
i disagree. people not caring about important topics is a failure of democracy. one issue is the reason why they don't care. in many cases it is the feeling of being unable to influence change. and that most certainly is a failure of the system.
my conclusion though is that it isn't a failure of democracy itself, but rather that it makes the system less democratic.
Because of the circumstances under which the USA was federated, we have done pretty strong systems in place to prevent local activism from having a national impact.
It doesn't prevent the federal government itself from surveiling the population (e.g. the Patriot act and everything descending from it) but at least if something is legal in a state, companies in that state can generally transact with residents of any state. (for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquette_National_Bank_of_Min....)
US logic is only billion dollar companies should track personal information
Personally I prefer the former as governments will spend my tax money on getting the data from the billion dollar companies anyway, and those companies will exponentially monetise it because they are required to
When I open a bank account, every bank is legally required to forward my personal information and transaction history exceeding $600/yr to the federal government, and there's nothing I can do about it.
I don't have to have a Facebook account or credit or debit card (and I don't have any of those) so I only get spied on by businesses I choose to deal with. Not only that, but most businesses I deal with give me a 3% discount when using untraceable cash, instead of payment processors.
On top of that, when businesses get out of hand, customers choose to support a new business and the old one fails. This can be financially detrimental to those invested in the business, but it is much, much less bloody than when the same thing happens with a government.
Whenever I hear someone telling me they have nothing to hide, I ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to me. The joke still goes over people heads sometimes.
But I "trust" the gouvernement in a different way that I trust you.
- With that access you can also "do" things, like sending messages or delete stuff.
- I'm worried that you could judge me in a different way than the government would judge me. Because if you are a friend I care how you see me. But I don't care what the authorities think of me as long as I don't do anything illegal, they won't care.
(Just playing devil's advocate here)
There isn't any reason to think people are obeying the laws in the privacy of their own spaces. Historically there are actually good reasons to think people are disobeying the law, but the laws are stupid and it is better not to check unless there is a political opponent to take out (eg, anti-homosexuality regulations).
There are definitely more countries that have blasphemy laws than are on the list on that page (e.g. Sri Lanka).
There are arguments for maintaining privacy but I don't really think this is one of them.
And I'm not sure who you are to say you are "below" the notice of the police. The police are primarily there to police the people at the bottom of society. The higher up the ladder of social status people climb the less they have to do with the police.
If you break E2E encryption, you can likely also impersonate and "do" things.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/us/paul-jones-fertility-s...
Or like this guy?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/fertility-doctor-own-s...
Seems that 'fertility doctor' is a simple hack for personal breeding program. There are more of these cases too.
One of these guys had 100+, and until he was caught, had zero child support costs. He's like a cockoo bird.
(Not saying it's moral, hacking may or may not be moral.)
I'm not sure most people get a medical degree to "obtain one suitable mate and have a few offspring". I think most people do that to be a medical practitioner.
You could say people want to be medical practitioners because they want to find love and start a family but you could also say they want it because they want to be comfortably wealthy and financially secure.
Then an election happens and people who very much care about your previously non-illegal behavior gain access to years of historical data.
Trusting an organization is a category error. You cannot trust something composed of people who are regularly replaced every few years and who operate according to written rules ("laws") which they are allowed to change.
2) "as I don't do anything illegal, they won't care" - This is a fallacy. First, they can absolutely harass you even if you end up winning in court eventually. Second, what is legal and illegal changes over time. Third, plenty of things which are illegal (wrong according to legality) are not wrong according to morality (they harm no-one) - they are just illegal because humans who feel the need to control others wrote down a piece of text describing punishments for them.
3) Plenty of countries have stupid laws.:
Example 1: it's illegal to approve illegal actions - which basically means you can't ever argue for to change the law to make something legal because you'd be approving it. Usually it's not enforced as such but given how the law is often phrased, it often can be.
Example 2: it's illegal to endorse the use of violence - this is the stupidest law there is:
- It is by definition contradictory because all governments base their power on violence[0] so according to this law you can't support the existence of the government itself.
- It's contradictory in how it treats historical and current actions. You are free to celebrate the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, The French Revolution or Us independence, even though they were all violent actions - they were morally good but illegal under the laws at the time. But you can't say that current dictators should be killed. A friend got a warning from reddit just yesterday for saying not that a certain dictator should be assassinated but that he should be sentenced to death and then executed by anyone in a position to do so.
[0]: The government has such a strong monopoly that the violence just needs to be implied and most people will submit and the rest are used as examples "this is why it's stupid to fight a cop".
A lot of social media today will sanction you if you say such things as "it's ok to punch a Nazi". But won't sanction a Nazi for saying things like "white replacement theory".
AFAIK it was automated, she appealed and won. But it has a chilling effect on people and some won't bother appealing. I'd do it anyway just to waste their time because they have to use a human to review.
This is a good time to remind every tech worker that if you're working for an exploitative corporation, you have the moral obligation to do your job as poorly as you can: https://drewdevault.com/2025/04/20/2025-04-20-Tech-sector-re...
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Corporations these days have way more power to control speech than governments just a few decades ago and some people still refuse to call it censorship because they find some obscure definition which says it has to be done by a government.
We will have to fight for the same freedoms as just a few generations ago because people learned nothing.
Alternatively, you also ask them to release the Epstein files... :-)
Knowledge is power. Does it feel like the balance of power is currently tilted too far in favor of individuals?
So I am not suggesting drilling holes. I am pointing out the obvious.
Better to just wait for ship to sink naturally. From the holes.
This doesnt really detract from your overall point, but you may be underestimating how easy it already is for the government to tell how you will vote, without use of networking information. Just knowing someone’s educational level and zip code is enough to guess their voting preferences to a high degree of accuracy (the latter component being the reason why gerrymandering is so effective).
I suspect the vast majority of people on the street would absolutely unlock their phone at request when taking their phone to be repaired. But really, I doubt many actually personally know the people involved, will likely never see them ever again, and their judgement of the company involved and their hiring practices limited to "They have a decent enough looking storefront that says "Screen Repair" on it".
Weather they should do that is another discussion, but I can't imagine a working society if every position of trust like that breaks down. I can't buy groceries from someone I haven't personally vetted the farming practices of. I have to check every time I drink water for contaminants. There's a lot of outsourcing of trust already in society, and it kinda mostly works.
I have rather little to hide myself but I want desperately for you to be able to hide something. Otherwise we're together a worse deterrent against authorities behaving badly as we would otherwise be.
If most people can reason about the current historical moment as it relates to policy decisions, well I guess that's an equally dangerous sort of problem.
Firstly I am not sure what "current historical moment" means.
Generally most people don't have the will, knowledge or knowhow to understand political policy. Political policy seems to be constantly at odds with reality (if you listen to Dominic Cummings Q/A and/or Interviews he spells out how dysfunctional it is).
Even if that is the case more often than not now the power structures in the Western World are setup in a particular way where it is opaque, protects itself and does not serve the people that it is suppose to govern.
Let’s say they do that. What would you do next? Go over their photos? Private messages with their so? And then what? Laugh at something that you found there? Would you feel then that you proved some point? I just don’t understand how this scenario would play out in real life
Without it, we are being manipulated because of all the stuff these parasites now know about us. All in the name of "enhancing the customer experience".. #puke
The only thing missing is actually the community and usage, because the technology has a network effect, and more users with stable routers provide faster and a more reliable network. So it's indeed slow at the moment. I highly recommend giving it a chance and playing a bit with it. Even for non-anonymity and security cases, it's fun to play with hole punching, global addressing by public keys, and stuff like that, which you can see in things like Iroh and libp2p.
It provides a simple universal SAM interface and libraries to work with it to plug other apps.
Is this like running a Tor node where you could potentially get a knock on the door because somebody else went on some pedo website?
I2P is mainly an overlay network that routes traffic only inside the network. The upside is that providers won't ban your IP for participation if you run a node. I know that with Tor, many datacenters/CDNs don't care whether it's a relay or exit node and will blanket ban all known IPs of the network. You also won't attack someone on the clearnet or somehow participate as a scapegoat in clearnet crimes.
I've never heard about any consequences for running non-exit relays in Tor, though if you're in a country that strictly punishes usage of any anonymous technology, that might be risky anyway.
I2P has several commercial "outproxies" that proxy traffic to the usual internet, but that's not the intended usage and it's not enabled on typical users' routers.
UPD: Anyway, if you feel uncomfortable sharing others' traffic and want to only use it as a client, you can disable transit traffic completely in both Java and C++ implementations.
It really wasn't that long ago that we were all talking about SOPA.
Additionally, keep in mind that controversial laws or proposals, at least in France, are often announced or passed during summer vacation when people are away, limiting scrutiny and attention.
Expect to hear more outrage come September
Large gatekeepers get flack from politicians if they allow "the wrong people" to organize. First they claim there is a huge problem with terrorists/nazis/pedos/etc., maybe even find a couple of real instances of those things, and use that to demand that the gatekeepers Do Something, i.e. set up a censorship apparatus.
But the modern ones are subtle. You don't try to read something and get refused, it just goes to the bottom of the feed where you won't see it. Take advantage of the human failing that busybodies will take petty satisfaction in causing harm to strangers they've been told are their enemies. Let them issue false reports against anyone pointing out the emperor has no clothes. Have the algorithm take those reports seriously, with useless or non-existent customer service that can do nothing about adversarial report brigading. Make it known that this is what happens to people who don't toe the party line so people self-censor and people who don't get shadow banned.
It's an assault on the ability of the public to defend itself from bad ideas.
Large gatekeepers delenda est.
Politicians from countries like Germany have tried to make EU decide things like this on the "majority principle" for ages (because they know they can bully smaller countries into submission), but we still have the consensus principle.
Every country has to agree. So it takes only one country to put a stop to it.
Beware attacks on checks and balances like this. If they actually work, someone will try to get rid of them.
That tends to confirm my feeling that people in countries that have not suffered from tyrannical government for a long time have forgotten the value of privacy and freedom of speech because they have not seen the consequences in living memory. This is coming when the last of the people who remember the pre WW2 era are dying. Dictatorship is no longer part of living memory.
There has definitely need a cultural change in the UK in the last few decades. People have far more trust in the system (government and big business) or have learned helplessness (in a recent discussion about privacy people told me I was naive to think I could stop my private data being collected anyway so should not bother trying). This was in the context about what people say about their kids (specifically education, mental health, family problems) on Facebook.
> Every country has to agree. So it takes only one country to put a stop to it.
A lot of pressure can be brought on bear on any one country by the rest though.
The government of a country may not have the same view as the people. When the UK was in the EU the government pushed EU surveillance regulation, IMO so they could then then say it was not their fault it was introduced, they had to follow the EU directive (many years ago when there was strong public opposition to more surveillance).
I think it is more complex than that, see Hungary and Poland (though Poland is a bit on the rebound).
Which is why I am for majority principle, even though I am from a small country that would lose out on power. Countries still can leave using article 50 if it is not palatable for them.
Different indeed.
Privacy is enforced through compliance and civil court actions. In 2018, one of the largest actual data breaches at the time (~300 million customer records) netted about $0.25 per record in penalties, after several years of lawyering. ($52 million (US)/$23 million (UK)).
The EU makes more money fining companies for policy violations:
A €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) fine was imposed by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for transferring Facebook users' personal data from the EU to the US in violation of GDPR.
That is what privacy is about.
https://nationalcioreview.com/articles-insights/extra-bytes/...
People are usually asked to 'think about the children'. Pedophiles, drugs, suicides, self-harm, cyberbullying; and whatever other horror stories the media has at hand. This maneuver is usually sufficient to neutralize the opposition.
The President is accepting bribes (Paramount, Disney, Twitter, Facebook, Apple) and he is being allowed to use power that constitutionally is suppose to belong to the Congress.
Just one example from the many:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/17/europe/hungary-child-abus...
Here he is on television promoting it in 1982 [1].
- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Cohn-Bendit#Allegations...
I am not sure how it will be implemented that politicians are only excempt when texting about work. It seems like any implementation will allow politicians to avoid surveillance by using their work phone.
It will die this time and they will try to bring it back in 2 years time.
One thing I do not understand is why people in Denmark allow this to happen. Where are the large scale protests against the party that brought this zombie back to life?
These things should first be tested for 5 years on every politician and every civil servant, including their families, including their children.
Security researches should be given the freedom to hack that system as much as they can, in order to find security problems, no prosecution guaranteed.
Every access to data should be logged on a public blockchain with pseudonymization of who accessed whose data.
After those 5 years, reports and statistical analysis about the usefulness should be published: how many crimes were prevented, who went to jail for what, who had to go to court for what, with references to the logged data in the blockchain.
Then the public gets to vote on if they want this or not.
Regarding Chat Control: Do we know who is lobbying for it so much? Maybe journalists should focus on finding dirt on the lobbying organizations, so that everyone knows about them.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimite...
Their whole deal is to convince legislators that scanning every image on your device for CSAM is absolutely necessary (https://www.thorn.org/) and then selling a tool to do that to companies (https://safer.io/).
If it's legally required, what else are you gonna do but go to them for a "solution"?
Total surveillance, which we are talking about here, is extremely damaging to the subject, eventually all their dirty secrets will be out, legal and illegal.
I also argue that allowing the state to monitor its citizens fundamentally changes it closer a state I don’t want to exist. Nothing good can come out a surveillance state, no matter how small.
The politicians and civil servants will do that for us, which is what we are paying them for anyway: to work for us.
This way they'll think twice if they really want this to get started.
The worst thing that could happen to freedom is that the system would actually work as advertised. Because then resistance would be impossible.
If a government is so powerful they can stop even just 99% of crimes, they are so powerful that people can't rise up against it. At that point it's only a matter of time until authoritarians get elected and get rid of elections. The probability is not 0 which means it'll happen eventually with a probability of 1.
We need to be able to resist. Look at how many democracies were created by violent revolutions. How many bad people had to be killed before they stopped trying for a while. How many bad people had to be threatened with being killed before they gave up power "voluntarily".
You think the Velvet revolution was peaceful? Imagine you're an asshole who oppressed 10M people for years until they got fed up and 1M of them are now in the square right in front of your eyes, angry and shouting. What do you think is gonna happen if the implied violence materializes? How many cops do you need to stop 1M people and how many of those cops are actually gonna turn their weapons against you too? The real power is always held by men with guns (and these days with drones).
Or look at Syria. You think the cunt in charge fled out of goodwill to stop the bloodshed? No, he fled because he didn't wanna end up bleeding out on the pavement and then be hung up at a gas station as a temporary flag of freedom.
We need to be able to resist and that includes being able to talk about violence, even promote it when the violence is just (not legally but morally). We need to be able to make people angry, to promote hate against injustice. And we need to be able to organize without the government knowing until it's too late for them. And yes, those abilities will be used by bad people too but that's the price we need to pay.
Let's pick our pitchforks up and pretend sexual abuse monetization or human trafficking are not taken to the next level thanks to end to end encryption. We gotta make police do their damn jobs right? It's not our fault we invent new and improved ways that prevent police from doing that.
> When executing the detection order, providers should take all available safeguard measures to ensure that the technologies employed by them cannot be used by them or their employees for purposes other than compliance with this Regulation, nor by third parties, and thus to avoid undermining the security and confidentiality of the communications of users.
EU demands impossible.
I mean, if slavery was still legal or LGPT still illegal, would the government have been able to use this technology to smother political movements before they ever start? Wouldn't the government be able to add client-side scanning for words or phrases they don't like (not just images of child abuse)?
For democracy to work at all, people must at least be able to freely discuss there contrarian thoughts amongst themselves, even if they run contrary to the ruling party's wishes. I did not expect the cradle of democracy to be the one to kill it.
Once they can read everything again, and more, the next step will be to use your own network, a.k.a. the multinet, which is mostly an advanced form of the disparate networks in the 20th century. Even ARPANET was just another network, which evolved into the B.S. we have today. We also don’t have to use the same protocol stack, routing, etc. We could get rid of name resolution and just use some long IDs.
Seems like eventually the law will get some poor girl killed when the authorities contact her parents about "CSAM," discover that it was the girl herself who took the picture and sent it to her boyfriend, her dad finds out she was having sex and does an honor killing.
But we're just supposed to trust that these image hashes have a small false positive rate, when there's no way to have transparent review without making it easy for adversaries to avoid the scan.
globalnode•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
globalnode•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
roer•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
It essentially feels like a referendum on "should we just accept it?" It being whichever over those you think is the lesser over two evils. Figuring that out is an exercise left to the reader.
irusensei•5mo ago
globalnode•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
Straw man my ass.
Edit: I'm against the mass surveillance and direction things trending in, but I think either way we are facing a significant negative externality whichever way we choose. Either there's real people suffering real harm, or we're getting screwed by sliding into 1984. Both of those horrible. If we pick one horrible over the other, we're essentially saying "I'm ok accepting this horrible reality in order to avoid a different horrible reality".
I just don't think we can have our cake and eat it too on this issue.
frm88•5mo ago
irusensei•5mo ago
We're supposed to be smart around here right? No 11 year old kid of mine would have access to anything other than offline educational material.
globalnode•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
The only suggestions I see are things like Chat Control and things like "how about be a better parent". In practice, neither of these work. Chat Control we lose out on too much privacy and get dangerously closer to 1984. "Just be a better parent" is basically the strategy we have now, and it isn't working. I wrote in another comment what happened to my niece, I won't repeat it, but TL;DR as a parent you don't know what you don't know and your best efforts can go in vain.
exe34•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
exe34•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
exe34•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
exe34•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
exe34•5mo ago
or be honest and say you want a police state for everybody.
latentsea•5mo ago
Pretty unrealistic at actually being a workable solution, and obviously so.
You misunderstand my position. I don't want a police state for everybody. I think that's the greater of two evils. It's just from personal experience that I wrote about elsewhere in this thread, I know the depths of the horror of opting for the status quo. It's brutally fucked up.
But at least I'm honest enough to say I'd rather live in a free society where kids are subject to abuse than risk a full-on dictatorship where everyone is subject to a different kind of abuse. I'm willing to accept those kids as collateral, because at least it's only a subset of people as opposed to all people.
The thing that bothers me about the discussion is everyone I've talked to who is on the same side as me is either blissfully or willfully unaware of the reality of what's happening to large numbers of kids, or they won't be honest and say that even in the face of knowing the reality that they accept it's a sacrifice they are willing to make.
So be honest.
exe34•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
One of the things we learnt from the police in my niece's case was that even if you're the best parent there are still ways it can happen. They mentioned cases of videos taken on streaming apps where there were multiple girls in the video. E.g. the kids were having sleepovers with their friends etc. That absolutely blew my fucking mind, because I could never in a million years have imagined the possibility of a group of kids together in the same room flashing their tits and playing with themselves on camera in front of both each other and strangers with parents downstairs no less... and yet... apparently that's a thing.
Also, plenty of people have sudden changes in circumstances outside of their control that greatly change their capacity to handle life either permanently or temporarily, but that can be enough to allow things to start slipping through the cracks. E.g. your partner suddenly dies in an accident or from a health condition, and you're left heartbroken, depressed, and having to support the rest of the family to the best of your now much more limited ability. Heck maybe even the kids are just trying to fulfill some unmet needs.
But no, some people think it's fine to just always blame the parents as if it's possible for every parent to have always protected their kids in every single circumstance. News flash, it's not. Does it apply in some cases? Yes. Does it apply in all cases? No. It's just a convenient, lazy way to make sure they don't have to feel bad about their own personal views without really grappling with the full depth of the issue.
And take the parents out of the equation for a second and actually think of the children. They don't get to choose their parents or choose what happens to their parents. Is it fair to them personally that this happens? No.
exe34•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cch/home-internet...
Meaning 97% of parents are evaluating theoretical future based risks against real-world utility of entertainment, education and socialising, and choosing to opt for having it than not having. Presumably backed by decades of their own sample size n=1 data of "I used it, and it was mostly fine for me the vast majority of the time".
Contrast that with what you're suggesting. The data linked says that of the 3% of kids that don't have have internet access at home, only 2% of those don't have it for security and privacy reasons.
Policy makers have to make policy that's going to work for real people. Your ideas and suggestions read more like that physicist joke that ends in the punchline "I have a solution, but it will only work for spherical chickens in a vacuum".
exe34•5mo ago
right so the parents are making the decision and then you want a nanny state to look after the kids.
latentsea•5mo ago
Guess we should just leave 100% of that up to the parents too? I don't imagine anything bad would happen in your perfect parents in a vacuum world, so we might as well.
exe34•5mo ago
latentsea•5mo ago
Your super responsible community based approach just got your kids diddled hard.
pqtyw•5mo ago
I mean it's like trying to solve income inequality with by adopting Bolshevist communism...