GDPR meant nothing: chat control ends privacy for the EU [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NyUgv6dpJc

by givemeethekeys • 11 months ago

452 392 11 months ago

globalnode4• 11 months ago

Nudge the door open with child abuse "concern" and then expand to your hearts content later. The analogy of it being like a police officer standing next to you while you chat online to a friend was great. He was joking when he said "lets cancel cars" but it might happen in the distant future. Letting people control heavy projectiles doesnt seem like such a great idea.

latentsea14• 11 months ago

When you put "concern" in scare quotes like that... are you saying that there isn't actually anything to be concerned about regarding the safety of children using the internet?

globalnode4• 11 months ago

of course its concerning, but i doubt its the ultimate objective and it also seems contrived given the other dangers to children that abound.

pqtyw7• 11 months ago

Perhaps? But that seems mostly tangential to this specific issue?

I mean it's like trying to solve income inequality with by adopting Bolshevist communism...

I_am_tiberius• 11 months ago

It's good to see there are still rational Americans.

SanjayMehta• 11 months ago

European governments are all for free speech whilst imposing sanctions and invading other countries to export “democracy and human rights.”

Fascinating to watch.

(Downvoted, as expected. The hypocrisy on this site is absolutely adorable.)

sMarsIntruder• 11 months ago

It's probably just one single guy scrolling through all the posts and downvoting covered in sweat.

[Confirmed]

FranzFerdiNaN2• 11 months ago

Which countries have been invaded by European countries to bring democracy? Because America started multiple wars for that in the last 70 years, not Europe.

closewith10• 11 months ago

Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali, Somalia. The expeditionary European powers like the UK, Spain, etc can't hide behind the US when they were willing participants.

reactordev• 11 months ago

sniff encrypted chats, hahaha. Some law makers are completely clueless. I like Louis Rossmann. He looks like he’s been up stressed for weeks, yet his arguments are pretty level headed.

tokai3• 11 months ago

I wonder what the chances are that the ECJ could look at employing actions for annulment against chat control, if it is passed. It is possible for private individuals to ask the court to annul an EU act that directly concerns them. So even if governmental structures across EU does not want it challenged, the issue could still be brought to the court.

ekianjo7• 11 months ago

has the ECJ ever done anything like that before?

tokai3• 11 months ago

Yes all the time. Seems like there is a handful cases a year. Poland, as an example, has won 19 annulments between 2004–2023.

ekianjo7• 11 months ago

Louis makes it sound that its actually for protecting the children but we all know its just an excuse for surveillance, control, and ultimately jailing people for wrong opinions (a real threat in the EU since there is no protection of Freedom of Speech anywhere)

em-bee18• 11 months ago

jailing people for wrong opinions (a real threat in the EU since there is no protection of Freedom of Speech anywhere)

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.

wmf4• 11 months ago

"Hatred against a group of people" has been stretched to the breaking point in recent years.

pqtyw7• 11 months ago

you can however criticize others and at this point germany provides even more protection than the US.

Would what last few episodes of South Park be legal if they were made by Germans and targeted German politicians? Probably not?

Maken• 11 months ago

The European Convention of Human Rights explicitly protects freedom of expression.

wmf4• 11 months ago

Yeah but look how many exceptions there are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Con...

ekianjo7• 11 months ago

nope. part 2 of the article 10 basically nullifes the freedom of speech for any bs reason given by the government. that counts for nothing.

dkiebd2• 11 months ago

October, 2018: "In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction for disparaging the Prophet Muhammad."

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...

account4213• 11 months ago

If it doesn't protect someone denying the holocaust then it won't protect any other expression that the government in power doesn't like.

pqtyw7• 11 months ago

The first amendment in the US did too but it took more than a 100 years for the current interpretation to become the consensus in the legal system.

ljlolel3• 11 months ago

Isn’t EU’s justification that they protect you from companies / private industry but they want full government/police control because that’s trusted / socialist?

wmf4• 11 months ago

Yes, privacy has worked that way for a long time. There's no gotcha here.

closewith10• 11 months ago

The EU is at its heart a neoliberal institution, not at all socialist.

ljlolel3• 11 months ago

Capitalist doesn’t really fit with the gdpr. And anything but full trust of government also wouldn’t fit with chat control.

SilverElfin2• 11 months ago

Start with protecting children. Then something about misinformation. Then about defending democracy. Then about stopping terrorism. And soon you can escalate your authoritarian policy to just about anything.

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.

FpUser2• 11 months ago

"Start with protecting children..."

This is exactly what I think about it: https://youtu.be/J07wReeRF7Y?si=_VfrNiGRnG-_7dHX

tokai3• 11 months ago

Between FISC, the Patriot Act/USA Freedom Act, and such it doesn't seem like the US constitution is doing a good job at protecting anyone. There is a long wikipedia article named Mass surveillance in the United States, but not yet one for the EU.

dmix• 11 months ago

FISA and patriot act are very controversial, the EU doing the same thing but far worse isn’t a good argument to stand on merely because the US gets talked about more on Wikipedia and therefore the press (which is one of the primary acceptable sources for a wiki article). Not to mention places like Germany and France did much of what NSA was doing back in the 2000s, often with even more leeway.

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.

SilverElfin2• 11 months ago

I don’t disagree. But there is still far more protection for free speech in the US than in the EU, where wrongthink is not acceptable to the powers that be. It is a huge regression and for some reason, culturally Europe seems to be modeling itself more after China than the US, with whom it shares more history and values.

aspenmayer• 11 months ago

There is a long wikipedia article named Mass surveillance in the United States, but not yet one for the EU.

I agree with your other points. There is this though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#European_Uni...

owenversteeg• 11 months ago

I have long campaigned against Fourth Amendment violations in the US, but to compare the US and the EU is laughable. The difference is night and day in every aspect, from constitutional rights to privacy (virtually worthless in most EU constitutions vs quite broad in the US) to practical surveillance (far deeper and broader in the EU) to court requirements for access for typical requests (commonplace in the US, rare in the EU.)

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.

em-bee18• 11 months ago

* I’m surprised the EU doesn’t seem to have such protections for free speech and privacy and against warrantless surveillance*

individual countries, such as germany do have these protections.

closewith10• 11 months ago

Unless you oppose genocide, in which case your freedom of speech evaporates.

account4213• 11 months ago

Is this supposed to be a joke? Germany has about the worst speech restrictions of any western democracy.

ls6123• 11 months ago

Covid was only 5 years ago can you imagine what people would have used this sort of power for during the lockdowns? How are people's memories so short especially with regards to such a traumatic experience that we all had?

kanbara• 11 months ago

if the framing is “pandemic controls bad because my rights are more important than public health in a global pandemic” it’s not a very convincing argument.

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

closewith10• 11 months ago

Most people in Europe were happy with the pandemic response, so that's a non-issue.

account4213• 11 months ago

People generally cheered along the authoritarian measures that were employed during covid.

komali2• 11 months ago

This is why having the structure of fundamental civil rights, like in the US constitution, is important.

How's that structure working out in upholding fundamental civil rights in the USA?

ElFitz• 11 months ago

According to Wikipedia, the Russian constitution mentions the following:

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.

hdgvhicv8• 11 months ago

The biggest set of propaganda is that America has “free speech”

cookiengineer2• 11 months ago

I want to be not snarky but I can't:

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...

account4213• 11 months ago

The US has a long tradition of creatively interpreting their constitution, really no reason to bring trump into this discussion.

t0lo5• 11 months ago

Let me guess- preventing child abuse- unless it's done by an israeli government official of course https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/16/nevada-arres...

echelon4• 11 months ago

I hate the "protect the children" argument so much.

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.

wolvesechoes8• 11 months ago

Stop putting god and other people's children in my life. That's none of the government's business

This is very naive worldview.

cenamus• 11 months ago

The other point is that people don't even care. Teachers with CP possession don't do any time, just one or two year suspended sentence. Most of the terrorists, be it by bus, truck, gun or knife, were well known to the police ahead of time. Did that stop the attacks? Would more "chat control" change any of that? Fuck no....

t0lo5• 11 months ago

It's an interesting argument that with a declining birth rate childrens protection should be less in the picture. I'm more inclined to think that we owe it to the next generation to give them something viable and recognisable as a childhood, and it's communities obligation to raise them. Those who want privacy will usually find it.

continuational• 11 months ago

I don't like that argument either.

However, the continued existence of society requires other people's children, so maybe it's a pretty important investment?

bboygravity5• 11 months ago

Did you really have to add the Israeli thing there?

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?

t0lo5• 11 months ago

This isn't even epstein, it's an active member of the likud party, but since you've mentioned epstein i guess i should say that the former prime minister of israel also visited his island numerous times and bolster my point. And yeah, it's my moral obligation to include it.

throwawayxcmz• 11 months ago

Go on, tell me what country other than Israel has Epstein?

VladVladikoff2• 11 months ago

Is it possible to make an encrypted messenger app without a central authority? Like BitTorrent magnet links. We all share the messages to support the network bandwidth, but can only see the messages which pertain to us? From my really novice understanding of cryptography, this should be possible. And it seems like the only privacy focused solution for the future.

Edit: looks like it exists, and is called Briar.

lmz• 11 months ago

Isn't that sort of like how Tor works?

thaumasiotes5• 11 months ago

You can send encrypted email. That's how email already works.

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!

frollogaston4• 11 months ago

Regular encrypted email relies on a certificate authority

b8• 11 months ago

You can encrypt the email content with PGP or Age, sure. However, metadata such as the Subject line, sender and receiver are in plaintext. Lavabit fixed this, but requires money. You can use i2p tools to fix this too.

cedws• 11 months ago

Tox also.

frollogaston4• 11 months ago

Yes but it requires exchanging public keys out of band.

VladVladikoff2• 11 months ago

Couldn’t we spend a small amount of crypto to write our public key into a blockchain to avoid the MITM threat?

kragen• 11 months ago

You could use Granovetter introduction.

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.

scellus• 11 months ago

The new version of Bitchat (from Jack Dorsey) is interesting: it's a chat over BLE mesh, but says that it'll continue the chat on the nostr infrastructure if two (in principle anonymous) participants fave each other in the app. Haven't had able to try this out yet.

BrenBarn• 11 months ago

There are different solutions with different levels of decentralization. Briar is peer-to-peer. Matrix has servers but in a federated model, so there is no central authority but in some sense each server is an "authority" for users on that server.

raphinou• 11 months ago

Maybe https://delta.chat/en/ : completely decentralized as based on email infrastructure, e2e encryption, easy registration without providing personal data.

nine_k2• 11 months ago

Yes,it is possible to create a p2p encrypted messenger without any central node. It is even possible to have a relatively good UX in it.

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.

atmosx5• 11 months ago

Will be in illegal. Why risk jail?

throwaway-0001• 11 months ago

https://delta.chat/en/download Seems the best app (no web version)

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“

jinnko• 11 months ago

Once upon a time, prior to Microsoft or eBay purchasing it, this is what Skype was. It required a set of central instances to be supernodes to facilitate discovery, then each client communicated with others directly. And IIRC any client up long enough and with sufficient compute and bandwidth, could become a supernode.

bboygravity5• 11 months ago

It also had the side effect of having far better latency than any modern day popular video calling app can offer.

Telemakhos• 11 months ago

Skype and iChat both did direct client-to-client communication. Skype was bought by MS, and Apple got sued by a CIA front company over iChat. The result was the same both ways: all comms started getting routed through a central server that could log metadata.

fsflover2• 11 months ago

I don't understand why obsolete technologies by MS are often upvoted on HN and become the first replies, while the corresponding working, decentralized technologies go to the bottom. Matrix exists and has a preliminary P2P version [0,1]. Other messengers were also mentioned in the comments here. Another example of such tendency is here: [2].

[0] https://arewep2pyet.com/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393935

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44898242#44898884

wolvesechoes8• 11 months ago

If you try combat political issues mainly through technological solutions, you have already lost.

atmosx5• 11 months ago

Exactly. Part of the tech crowd is so naive when it comes to this sort of discussions…

4bpp2• 11 months ago

Well, conversely, if you figure you have already lost anyway, why not try the technical solutions?

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.

logicchains• 11 months ago

Although the chance of getting a large fraction of the population to use a decentralised censorship resistant messenger is low, it's still higher than the chance of somehow stopping the Eureaucracy from continuously pushing authoritarian policies.

AnthonyMouse5• 11 months ago

If you try combat political issues mainly through technological solutions, you have already lost.

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.

ezst2• 11 months ago

You have a spectrum of options going from centralised (Signal, WhatsApp, …) to federated (XMPP, Matrix) to P2P.

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.

thbb1232• 11 months ago

The problem I see with decentralized protocols is that node owners can easily be spotted, and then crushed under legal constraints that will make them more insecure than a strong multinational who's there just for profit and can balance legal fight for a relative privacy with it's own interest in protecting its customers.

happymellon• 11 months ago

Didn't Cwtch promise this? Not sure on the current state though.

ta12653421• 11 months ago

BitChat from Jack Dorsey

microtonal2• 11 months ago

Besides Briar, BitTorrent used to have a client like that for a brief time: https://www.bittorrent.com/blog/2015/05/12/bleep-private-mes...

tonyhart7• 11 months ago

that's what I am thinking, EU made GDPR that is good move prevent any third party to extract privacy data illegally but still doing it to themselves anyway

like what's happening????

jcdentonn• 11 months ago

Nobody is doing it. The law doesn't exist yet in the EU.

eviks5• 11 months ago

At least we got the cookies banners, that must count for something, right?

WA• 11 months ago

Please stop repeating this nonsense. The GDPR never mentioned cookie banners. This is the industry‘s shitty solution to forcing users to consent with tracking.

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.

burnerthrow0083• 11 months ago

So why do so many European government websites have cookie banners?

See, for instance: https://www.info.gouv.fr

panstromek2• 11 months ago

If the law incentivises bad behaviour, it's a bad law.

pembrook6• 11 months ago

Please stop repeating this nonsense defense of poorly designed policy.

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.

raffraffraff• 11 months ago

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.

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?

narrator• 11 months ago

They publicly go to privacy church every Sunday, but meanwhile they are worshipping the surveillance state cult in the back rooms.

wim• 11 months ago

Drop the “chat” and just call it “control”. The current proposal is so vague it would cover anything with online sharing/syncing people can sign up for. Any SaaS, any app, any service. Chat, email, file syncing, todo lists, doesn’t matter.

sunshine-o4• 11 months ago

I am pretty sure now that this ChatControl thing is the result of the EU being unable to setup an US type NSA/echelon type stealth mass surveillance system.

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.

pqtyw7• 11 months ago

Does EU really have any real security apparatus independent from it's member states as such that it would really have a need for something like this?

Also ChatControl is something being pushed by Denmark and other ideologically similar countries not necessarily the EU itself as such.

1oooqooq• 11 months ago

dictionary have wiretap. so just call it wireless tap.

samuelhautamaki• 11 months ago

Not only is the current proposal "vague", the current proposal also is most likely illegal. The EU courts already have ruled that legislation which weakens/breaks encryption goes against the EU fundamental rights.

seydor2• 11 months ago

When left unchecked and unaccountable, regulators will grow to fill the volume of their container

wuschel• 11 months ago

Who are the actors behind the ChatControl initiative?

I remember reading their names being blacked out.

dariosalvi78• 11 months ago

Danes and Swedes are in the forefront

croes3• 11 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)

thbb1232• 11 months ago

How comes US celebrities have to create their foundation in Sweden instead of the US?

lukan4• 11 months ago

"As of July 2013, Thorn is in talks with leading internet companies (Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Twitter and at least three others) to collaborate on creating a database of millions of child abuse images on the web."

So if one messed up person likes that stuff, I guess they might aim towards working there?

PeterStuer• 11 months ago

DSA was pushed by the very controversial Thierry Breton, former CEO of Atos, then European commissioner for the internal market, now on the advisory council of Bank of America.

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.

https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/139040

sunshine-o4• 11 months ago

DSA was pushed by the very controversial Thierry Breton, former CEO of Atos

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

tucnak2• 11 months ago

They say it's the Swedes, but that's not accurate. Thorn is a NSA-run charity that has been lobbying for this since 2012.

vaylian• 11 months ago

Interesting. Do you have a source for the connection between the NSA and Thorn?

pqtyw7• 11 months ago

They say it's the Swedes, but that's not accurate

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.

dlcarrier5• 11 months ago

EU logic: Want to centrally track users with personally identifiably information? Great! Want to store anonymized data with local cookies, that the user can delete, disable, or doctor at any time? That should be heavily restricted with constant intrusive warnings.

croes3• 11 months ago

The GDPR isn’t about anonymized data stored in local cookies.

dlcarrier5• 11 months ago

That's not what it was all about, but it sure was an effect of it.

throwawayqqq112• 11 months ago

Local governments all over the EU tried to push internet surveillance for a long time. Today, apparently the political landscale is ripe for their success.

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.

bboygravity5• 11 months ago

I have the same opinion, but I can't think of who or what would be pushing for that?

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?

dlcarrier5• 11 months ago

I was more so mocking the security theater in the GDPR, but now I see your frustration with how activism works in EU policy making.

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....)

hdgvhicv8• 11 months ago

EU logic is only government should be able to track personal information

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

seydor2• 11 months ago

US had PRISM and countless other programs to siphon all data

dlcarrier5• 11 months ago

Not that the US government doesn't constantly spy on its citizens, but I'd much rather businesses do so than the government.

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.

mardifoufs• 11 months ago

I guess that makes sense when you are part of the power wielding majority. but as someone who isn't, it's absolutely better for private corporations to have my data than governments. Sure, private corporations will end up giving said data to the government if required, but it's at least a step removed. And Facebook can't put me into MetaJail using MetaPrivatePolice (yet), whereas the government absolutely can.

lukeschlather3• 11 months ago

The EU lets you store whatever you want in cookies as long as they are truly anonymous (do not contain unique identifiers.) What you call "anonymized data" is literally the opposite.

dlcarrier5• 11 months ago

The term "anonymized data" is a bit jargony, but tracking everything a person does, but not storing the name or address of the person meets the definition most organizations use for "anonymized". It's very far from "anonymous".

firefoxd2• 11 months ago

"What do you mean you and your friend chat over Signal when there are dozens of other chat apps? Sounds like you two have something to hide, if you ask me." [0]

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.

[0] https://idiallo.com/blog/nothing-to-hide

jenadine• 11 months ago

Whenever I hear someone telling me they have nothing to hide, I ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to me.

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)

roenxi2• 11 months ago

Are you a lawyer? How confident are you that you aren't doing something illegal? At 30 seconds of thinking of an interesting example, there are still blasphemy laws on the books [0] in some parts of Europe and it isn't clear how compliant what people say at home is with hate speech laws. And there are a lot of laws out there that most people don't know about.

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).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law

whyever• 11 months ago

With that access you can also "do" things, like sending messages or delete stuff.

If you break E2E encryption, you can likely also impersonate and "do" things.

Almondsetat2• 11 months ago

That's a really bad devil's advocate, since the authorities care a lot about any behavior, even non (yet) illegal ones

firefoxd2• 11 months ago

To continue with your logic. Now, if anyone hacks the "gouvernement", they now have a master key to all our devices.

eastbound• 11 months ago

FBI employees have been stalking their ex-girlfriend using FBI database. That’s what we mean with “You may be doing things the government doesn’t like” — Abusive boyfriends can be part of a local government.

silverliver2• 11 months ago

Then to use Rossmann's counter-argument (TFV): Let's walk in a police station and have the nice policemen take a look instead.

trenchpilgrim• 11 months ago

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.

Then an election happens and people who very much care about your previously non-illegal behavior gain access to years of historical data.

martin-t3• 11 months ago

1) Trust is a human-to-human interaction which depends on being able to predict future behavior from past behavior (and often other cues, whether rational or not).

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".

belter• 11 months ago

I ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to me.

Alternatively, you also ask them to release the Epstein files... :-)

cinbun8• 11 months ago

IDK man. I don't think everyone has access to that one.

like_any_other2• 11 months ago

That's a bad argument - people trust the government differently than each-other. They also (should) mistrust the government differently. Voting is secret for a reason. How much of a chance do you think we have of meaningfully changing a government, if they can guess with 80% degree accuracy how everyone voted, based on their chats and social networks? When they know ahead of time who is assembling a new political party? When they know all of their friend's friends dirty secrets, and will tactically leak them to the press? Or simply prosecute them for spreading hate/antisemitism/homosexual propaganda/some other vague crime?

Knowledge is power. Does it feel like the balance of power is currently tilted too far in favor of individuals?

jonplackett2• 11 months ago

We’re already living in a world where FB and Google know this. Probably many others. No point adding to the list, but still. That ship sailed.

jdhwosnhw• 11 months ago

How much of a chance do you think we have of meaningfully changing a government, if they can guess with 80% degree accuracy how everyone voted, based on their chats and social networks

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).

lionkor• 11 months ago

The people in the government branches with access will be random individuals. It's the exact same as giving a stranger your phone unlocked, except that you should say "pls don't leak"

__MatrixMan__2• 11 months ago

I think it's better to move past the individual question entirely. I tell them to imagine whatever political power they fear the most and ask themselves how it would likely behave if it knew nobody could coordinate against it in secret.

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.

extraisland2• 11 months ago

The majority of people I've found will dismiss any arguments like this until something happens to them or someone they know.

Otek2• 11 months ago

I ask them to unlock their phone and hand it to me

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

Steven420• 11 months ago

The person would likely not want to unlock their phone and let you look around (hopefully) causing them to realize that privacy is important and they shouldn't give it up so easily

j45• 11 months ago

Maybe being asked to log into your banking and hand over the phone is an example worth considering.

devn0ll• 11 months ago

These days I use the automated pricing of Uber, and groceries based on the person and/or time of day, what apps you have on your phone, etc as the reason why we DEFINITELY want more privacy.

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

dmantis2• 11 months ago

I tried I2P not so long ago and was quite impressed by the design decisions and the quality of the technology. It's truly an amazing piece of software that covers basically everything you need for a distributed network.

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.

mannycalavera42• 11 months ago

https://geti2p.net/en/

shiomiru• 11 months ago

And if you don't want to install Java, there's also a C++ implementation: https://i2pd.website/

kachapopopow• 11 months ago

You got me into i2p. My rpi router and dozens of servers are now i2p floodfill nodes!

1gn15• 11 months ago

Thanks!

sunshine-o4• 11 months ago

I have been hearing good things about I2P for 2 decades but what are the risks when using that thing?

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?

dmantis2• 11 months ago

I2P doesn't have exit nodes like Tor, so it's essentially the same thing as running a Tor relay from an outside perspective, with a few positive differences.

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.

edem• 11 months ago

what is thing you are talking about? can you share some links?

tiku• 11 months ago

What if we make chats obfuscated instead of encrypted? So send a lot more data per sentence/word. It would need some sort of key on both sides to make sense of the data but it would be hard to use it without it. Or would that fall under the definition encryption?

ck512• 11 months ago

Security by obscurity is generally known to be ineffective; it's not an obstacle for even sightly dedicated thread-actors.

wolvesechoes8• 11 months ago

HN discovers there is unsolvable tension between public, its interest and its institutions, Ep. 1234.

xyzal• 11 months ago

Does anyone know where to find the text of the proposal? I wasn't able to find it.

layer83• 11 months ago

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...

re-lre-l• 11 months ago

And what people in western, democratic world think about it? That this is just fine? I live in autocratic, almost dictatorship regime country and for the past 100 years we've just gotten used to the idea that we don't have any rules here. But I thought in EU and US things are different. All these news stories about Control, UK surveillance, age verification, all this stuff with no significant reaction baffle me.

jchw• 11 months ago

I live in the United States and it baffles me just as much, trust me. Fine, maybe I didn't have the biggest expectations for the general public, but I really expected the Internet to react much more viscerally to what is happening. In the past, the Internet was much more defensive about Internet policing that was significantly less dystopian. Now, it feels like no matter how rapidly things decline, it's just another Tuesday; most people are unwilling to make any sort of sacrifice or risk for any cause, and nobody (including me, I guess) is really sure what to do anyways.

It really wasn't that long ago that we were all talking about SOPA.

nip• 11 months ago

A website was set up to inform and facilitate contacting MEPs: https://fightchatcontrol.eu

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

AnthonyMouse5• 11 months ago

This is, ironically, one of the reasons we need a more decentralized public square.

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.

layer83• 11 months ago

There is significant opposition from civil rights and privacy groups, from courts as well as from the EU Parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...

Roark662• 11 months ago

In my country that has managed to free itself from communism just 35 years ago everyone I know opposes it.

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.

AnthonyMouse5• 11 months ago

but we still have the consensus principle.

Beware attacks on checks and balances like this. If they actually work, someone will try to get rid of them.

graemep3• 11 months ago

In my country that has managed to free itself from communism just 35 years ago everyone I know opposes it.

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).

Paradigma11• 11 months ago

The problem with the consensus principle is that it will always be profitable for the Putins and Xis of this world to pay off an Orban or Fico to block EU decisions they dont like.

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.

Hilift• 11 months ago

But I thought in EU and US things are different.

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/...

pqtyw7• 11 months ago

Well Chat Control would offset that 10 fold...

azangru• 11 months ago

And what people in western, democratic world think about it?

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.

raverbashing• 11 months ago

Gee I don't know, maybe if the press and journalists weren't a bunch of useless pr peddlers maybe we could have a better gauge of it

scarface_74• 11 months ago

There are no rules in the US anymore either. We just pardoned 1500 criminals who tried to overthrow the government and kill representative.

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.

upeiYaer• 11 months ago

Are politicians really exempt? Must be some really high profile pedophiles, or pedophile supporters between them, like those in the Hungarian government - they support this by the way.

Just one example from the many:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/17/europe/hungary-child-abus...

sunshine-o4• 11 months ago

Sure, Daniel Cohn Bendit, MEP for 20 years, was a big promoter of pedophilia [0].

Here he is on television promoting it in 1982 [1].

- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Cohn-Bendit#Allegations...

- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IOAaSFpVCw

jakobnissen• 11 months ago

IIUC, no, they are not excempt. Certain professional contexts are excempt from surveillance, including political work, police work, military work and some corporate work. This is intended to prevent state or corporate secrets to be subject to surveillance.

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.

Roark662• 11 months ago

No chance in hell my country agrees to it (despite the darling of EU being the current prime minister). It is still a minority government and both the president and the people oppose it.

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?

irusensei3• 11 months ago

Follow the money. This and the sudden wave of internet censorship comes partly from AI companies lobbying trying to sell their new AI thing.

qwertox2• 11 months ago

Again, again and again:

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.

cookiengineer2• 11 months ago

The issue I have with this proposal is that politicians won't change their behavior. The optimum politician is an absolute pragmatist without any moral values. That is what you need to be to succeed in a federalistic democracy.

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.

amarcheschi• 11 months ago

To be honest, the journalists already focused on finding dirt

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/29/europol-sought-unlimite...

input_sh• 11 months ago

Oh we know who's behind it: a Hollywood celebrity-run charity that shadily hired multiple high-ranking Europol politicians.

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"?

conradfr• 11 months ago

Good idea, maybe this way we would have Ursula von der Leyen's sms with Pfizer!

Gud2• 11 months ago

I don’t think this is a fair treatment of anyone.

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.

qwertox2• 11 months ago

The point is that this way the public doesn't have to protest against it.

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.

martin-t3• 11 months ago

The problem is that _we don't want every crime to be caught or solved_.

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.

AtNightWeCode• 11 months ago

I voted for the only candidate that was clearly against this. However, the companies are suppose to do the scanning, not the police. Corporations like Meta already does things like this for sure. The difference is that they now will have to share potential crimes with the police. For Signal it is worse since it can't be added.

throwaway2903• 11 months ago

for ages I was saying "do not ignore crime that is now allowed to scale and proliferate thanks to e2e" (very much similar to crypto). If you accept this reality and work with the government you can arrive at a decent compromise that is not 100% bad. If you ignore reality and cover your ears and shout "nananana", the government will find a way and I guarantee you it will be a dumb way that undermines privacy way more. News at 11, the government did.

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.

account4213• 11 months ago

Is the EU investigating the Epstein client list then?

throwaway2903• 11 months ago

Show us the list?

moktonar• 11 months ago

Can you hear that Mr.Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability..

precommunicator• 11 months ago

Quoting from proposed text:

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.

silverliver2• 11 months ago

Isn't democracy rendered impossible with laws like this?

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.

sunaookami• 11 months ago

It's already impossible thanks to the DSA.

mnmalst• 11 months ago

Every single fucking day the whole world gets worse and worse. I am so sick and tired of this life.

plnsut• 11 months ago

The result of all of the hubbub over privacy in past years is that many people left more centralized services for other private servers, which means that the government can no longer just ask Twitter for your data and it’s a pita for them.

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.

lukeschlather3• 11 months ago

If this has the effect its proponents claim it will, it seems like substantially the larger outcome of this will be that government agents will be reviewing people's sexts. They say that false positives are rare, but how often is it okay for the government to be reviewing peoples' sexts? I found it a little hard to get concrete info on how exactly their image hashes work, but it sounds quite literally that if you've got a couple of young people (whether teens or twentysomethings) who are sexting, and their sexts look a bit like some piece of "known CSAM" if you squint, then a government agent will review it and possibly harass them.

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.

moi23884• 11 months ago

Even if they have a small false positive rate, the absolute figures will be staggering. 500 million people and all texts are being scanned, with more than 99% not being CSAM.. you do the maths..

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 11 months ago

but what if whatsapp refuses? majority of eu population rely on whatsapp for everyday life, they are going to revolt if whatsapp is pulled.

cyb0rg1• 11 months ago

EUSSR, an unvoted for central dystopian committee, led by WEF line Schwab, warmongers like Rutte and career aristocracy like Ausgeleiert (von der Leyen).

GDPR meant nothing: chat control ends privacy for the EU [video]

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