Fighting pedophilia at the expense of our privacy: The EU rule that could break the internet
The European Parliament and the Council are discussing a regulation that would ensure all messages get scanned for child pornography and which is perceived by many as a threat to basic freedoms
I think that article is kind of misleading. They're not fighting pedophilia. They're using it as an excuse / instrumentalizing it to push surveillance tech.
Yes, it's a fake argument. They tried to ban end to end encryption many times, with many excuses, and the attempts have failed so far. If I recall right, last time, the alleged reason was "terrorism". The currently purported reason of fighting paedophilia was picked on purpose in order to discredit any criticism by making critics appear as disgusting and despicable as possible to the public.
To be honest, I think they are for real convinced that they're pushing this to help fighting pedophilia. Most of the people in the government are so stupid when it comes to technology, you can't even believe it (just watch the TikTok trial, it was the only time I had some empathy towards TikTok). And the worst part is that they tend to get consultants which are even more stupid on the topic, the only thing they have is years of work in one of the Big Four.
Lately, with right-wing populism getting closer and closer to me, I've developed some more strong opinions on dupery and selling simple answers to complex problems.
It's probably a mixed bag, to some degree. But I think the people behind it, the ones really pushing it and selling it know what they're doing. They must have read the statistics and counter-arguments to be able to take part in the political debate.
I found this article talking about the statistics of investigations in 2019 in Germany. We had 13670 cases of child abuse and the police did 21 wiretapping orders. This leads me to believe either the police/judicative is utterly useless (they're not) or, electronic surveillance isn't a tool that is useful at all in those investigations. Yet somehow ... it get's promoted in this context.
And the EU member states pledged to be transparent with the statistics regarding Chat Control. They're currently breaking that law and not giving us the statistics to judge for ourselves. (They could well be hiding it deliberately.) To me it smells like somebody wants to push something fishy.
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter how we got there. It is an emotional topic, that's why it resonates with people and it's pretending to do something and selling a simple truth, one that sounds good. While you'd need a different solution if you wanted to tackle the issue you're talking about. If they're really exploiting the abused children to push their own agenda: Shame on them.
And maliciousness going along with incompetency is the worst mix I can imagine.
(Sorry for only giving german language references. I can't spend all of my day looking up articles for my Lemmy comments. Feel free to comment better ones and I'll bookmark them.)
Maybe we should just accept and embrace the change. Misuse of such control means by governments is unlikely in democratic countries such as European ones. And if things go really wrong laws can be abrogated or amended. The majority of people won't be affected and don't have anything to hide, so they don't care. We should go along and follow the tide.
If you think that bad things can never happen in a democracy, read a little bit of any history book in existence. Or, you know what, even a Wikipedia article is enough.
"I hAvE nOtHiNg To HiDe" I assume that you close the toilet door. Everyone knows that you go to that room to shit, so why wouldn't you be okay with the door being open? Are you actually doing drugs at the toilet instead of shitting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
Sorry, I can't tell if you're trolling or sincere. We can talk about that if you like. Privacy is a super important topic nowadays that we spend a good part of our time online and all kinds of data about our lives is stored on electronic devices.
No, we should definitely not simply accept this kind of unjust and overly excessive legislation. Reality has shown that even democratic governments will use these technological means for questionable purposes. Also, what if there is a security breach and god knows who gets access to everyone's private messages? The old story of "i have nothing to hide" is no excuse, everyone has a right to private communication without fear of "saying something wrong". Things that are okay to say now may not be in the future. We see a trend towards right and extremist parties in many European countries, what if they get access to everyone's communication and have the means to go after whoever they like? Once the door is open, there is no going back. And even if there is no bad intention and they really just look for child pornography: There are always false positives and algorithms are faulty. With this legislation, everyone is suddenly at risk of being visited by the police because some system decided that you are a threat
It would be true if we lived in actual democracies, but we don't.
I find it disgusting how the media keeps parroting that pseudo argument of protecting the children to justify blanket surveillance of everyone and everything.
"protecting children" is a trope used since the invention of children. Simpsons also picked it up, it's everywhere, mostly in right wing chatrooms to enable and encourage censorship (LGBT and whatnot)
What's weird, these media are possibly the only effective target of this e2ee ban. They are putting their journalists in danger. Pedos will only resort to a different app.
Given the widespread uncritical parrotting in the media, my respect for the journalistic trade is at an all time low and I might be as callous as saying that they bloody well deserve it.
Nothing outweighs the life and wellbeing of children! Therefore, cameras have to be installed in every room of every house. This is logical because more than 90% of all pedophiles operate in rooms within houses. No citizen has to worry about privacy, though. The video feeds will only be used to fight severe crimes such as pedophilia and copyright infringement.
Make it a suggestion for the next iteration of Alexa.
Don't give them more ideas!
First they scan for CP, but the next time a corrupt authoritarian leader is elected, what will stop them from using that conveniently pervasive infrastructure to silence journalists, dissidents or political opponents?
Europol has already stated that they want to use the means for other crimes.
The whole "protecting the children" angle is just propaganda.
Its not even about fighting pedophilia there are way more efficient methods for that and they don't use massager apps for pedo business, at least not ones that would comply with any laws...
Yea this is the dumbest crap. Pedos will just move to the dark web. Would surprise me if most haven't already.
Also "Some, like Apple, have their reservations about this initiative as they consider defending user privacy a priority." Bullshit.
Yeah the people defending that shit consume too much paint.
If you are searched on a private property, at least (and in theory) the law enforcement unit needs to get some sort of warrant before they could search you.
I don't see why we are opening access to our private digital sphere to them to do whatever and whenever they like, and most likely without us knowing what is going on.
Dear politicians and government officials, please come back when you stop covering up and protecting people like Epstein.
One of the countries supporting the proposal is Finland. One of the countries opposing the proposal is Finland. According to the article. A typo I presume.
Sign the following petitions if you care about this, I'll only take s minute of your time:
https://civicrm.edri.org/stop-scanning-me
https://www.change.org/p/european-parliament-defend-our-privacy-vote-no-to-chat-control
Shit like this is why i've been trying to convince my wife to leave.
We have these traffic violation "google maps cars" driving around giving fines to everyone in the vicinity of the person breaking a rule. To fight an unlawful fine can take weeks or even months for us citizens, yet they get the right to just blanket send them to everyone who's license plate is visible in the image.
Fuck that, take your responsibility back and do it right.
The same goes for public transport, they will add fees for a detour and expect you to not check on them even though you don't have to pay for it as a detour is on them. If you want to set it right you need to put in an appeal which again can take weeks or even months.
And now they expect me to trust them, hell if they roll this out i'll falsely end up in jail before the week is over.
Go where tho?
