How can they know they capture 99% of such content given that WhatsApp is (if I understand correctly) encrypted fully end to end such that Facebook cannot access the messages passing through it?
i.e., of the illegal stuff that goes through their system, some of it is captured, and the majority of that is caught by Facebook's own system.
Note, this article is recent and highly relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
> And when tech companies cooperate fully, encryption and anonymization can create digital hiding places for perpetrators. Facebook announced in March plans to encrypt Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material
> Data obtained through a public records request suggests Facebook’s plans to encrypt Messenger in the coming years will lead to vast numbers of images of child abuse going undetected. The data shows that WhatsApp, the company’s encrypted messaging app, submits only a small fraction of the reports Messenger does.
Talk about fear mongering, that article is horrible. It's the same old argument. "Child abuse is bad therefore you can't have any privacy", they position you as being against protecting children when your stance is actually pro security & privacy.
1. Privacy is important and good
2. It has almost certainly contributed to an explosion in the production and sharing of child pornography and abuse
The question is what is the moral way to reconcile the two, not to deny that either exists.
Child abuse has always been happening (several of the older members of my family were abused), it just wasn't broadcasted. Even today I bet 99% of child abuse is never caught on camera. The increase from child porn is probably negligible.
However, without perfect privacy, every world citizen would be subjected to such monitoring, and we'll basically be exactly what 1984 is, with the metaphorical "telescreen" functionality spread across pretty much every device that's connected to a network.
The USA took steps to actually protect property in its founding, something the Supreme Court has interpreted to include privacy as well. From this perspective, the rights of citizens wither away when the government is allowed to take the smallest step towards mass surveillance. For that reason I am very much against it.
My other perspective is from a security standpoint. I believe that if companies are not doing everything in their power to protect themselves and their users from data loss / hacking / theft, they put everyone at risk. Intentionally lessening the security of a product at the request of the US government means giving a potential thief or hacker more attack vectors to exploit.
> The Times’s reporting revealed a problem global in scope — most of the images found last year were traced to other countries — but one firmly rooted in the United States because of the central role Silicon Valley has played in facilitating the imagery’s spread and in reporting it to the authorities.
Clearly the NYT is laying the problem at tech's feet, and we are the best ones able to thwart this. Many times I've scoffed at the government's continual removal of privacy, but this is the first time it's sunk in. Perhaps they have a case.
> 1998 - 3k cases. 2008 - 100k. 2014 - 1M. 2018 - 18.4M.
These figures from a total of 45M images flagged.
Again, is this for real, or this this propaganda?
There are two things I would point out: 1) I would be surprisesd that the ease of communication the internet brought did not benefit to criminals 2) The article describes several problems that won't be fixed by encryption ban (e.g. the lack of means for report clearing houses) and also gives exemples of cases solved despite encryption. I would like to understand why encryption is described as the problem here.
Not to mention:
Congress has regularly allocated about half of the $60 million in yearly funding for state and local law enforcement efforts. Separately, the Department of Homeland Security this year diverted nearly $6 million from its cybercrimes units to immigration enforcement — depleting 40 percent of the units’ discretionary budget until the final month of the fiscal year.
Or in other words, in order to fight the imaginary rapists that Mexico is allegedly sending us, DHS is diverting money originally allocated to investigate actual child rapists.
Facebook has said that they don't do this outside of Australia, where it is required by law, but come on, are we really going to take Zuckerberg's word for it?
This is why I believe that end-to-end encryption is not truly useful unless the source code of the clients is public, or the protocol is open.
Any closed source client can read messages at the ends, or be forced to do so by an evil government.
At the very least, they could open up XMPP compatibility again so that people could write their own open source clients for it. Australia wouldn't be able to do anything about the propagation of such open source software.
I was able to have end-to-end encryption running on top of MSN, AOL, ICQ, QQ, Facebook, Gtalk, Yahoo, and several others about 10 years ago with Pidgin and simple plugins that encrypted/decrypted messages on the fly. It's too bad they all moved selfishly to closed source walled-garden mobile apps -- it's a big step back in privacy.
Matrix is close, but not what I'm describing. It's far more centralized than I'd like to see.
[1]: https://matrix.org/
They want a fishing net so they can catch these people by the thousands.
It's disgraceful that Signal hailed WhatsApp's announcement to use it almost like a second coming of a religious figure.