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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

The HN attitude on anything touching privacy with a ten foot pole is awkward at best. It's clearly a hard problem and increasingly so. Being dogmatic about privacy regulations without a solution for the abuse caused by those who are open to abusing others seems a little too internet-hippie to be taken seriously in 2022, and that's a little concerning when it's the echo chambers of those best qualified and responsible for coming up with workable solutions.

Edit: What a cacophony of indignation and polemic black/white responses. Absolutely shocking.

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> The HN attitude on anything touching privacy with a ten foot pole is awkward.

Because the power it gives is basically limitless. Once these things are implemented there will be no going back. It only kind of works when the government acts in good faith, and even then not really.

France passed laws against violent demonstrations, they ended up arresting people 200-300km away from Paris because they were suspected to go to a demo and potentially cause problems (because they had swimming googles and yellow vests, which are mandatory, in their cars), even though they didn't commit any crimes at the time. They also passed laws against terrorism, which ended up using them against the yellow vest protesters. Once the pandora's box is open you're fucked, forever, laws will be misused and abused

What's the next step ? 24/7 video monitoring ? Microphones in every room of your house ? That would also prevent crimes, do we want to prevent crime at all cost though ? We could just preemptively all live in jails, that would solve all these problems

When we say that privacy rights can absolutely not be touched, we are, among other things, also saying, whatever criminals get best at abusing those increasingly powerful rights (given the relatively growing space covered by encryption and stuff that happens through or over the internet) get to be more criminal and that's just the price we will have to pay for our collective freedom.

This insanely childish and irresponsible way of looking at and reasoning about our world gives of strong NRA vibes. As soon as you say NO MATTER WHAT you are in deep shit. When we become so dogmatic, that we can't even think, let alone talk about a problem anymore (and a problem it is, but, of course, there's then also the subset of people that will even call that into question) it's an issue.

I am not against privacy. I get glimpses of the good the bad and the ugly that are attached to it. None of these things are boundless. Reasoning about the space is hard. Pretending a concept as fragile and young as privacy is beyond reproach is just weird.

Increasingly powerful privacy rights? Do you live in opposite world? Surveillance is growing rapidly, police and other entities have orders of magnitude more data on us than they could have dreamed of a few decades ago, but because there remains an extremely narrow category of data they can't collect in bulk (the content of encrypted communication, but not the metadata), you call this growing privacy?

And all of this while rates of child abuse are falling: https://u.osu.edu/zagorsky.1/2014/09/18/adrainpeterson/

The power that the same old rights afford is increasing, because you don't have to leave your house to do some very nefarious stuff and encrypted communication is now a commodity. Any right to privacy meant relatively less in a world where entering a stone building and bringing guns was considered the premiere way to obtain money illegally, because (and I guess it speaks volumes about this whole thread that I feel the need to spell it out) you had to give up a good amount of your privacy by executing anything in that plan. That's often no longer the case.

> When we say that privacy rights can absolutely not be touched, we are, among other things, also saying, whatever criminals get best at abusing those increasingly powerful rights (given the relatively growing space covered by encryption and stuff that happens through or over the internet) get to be more criminal and that's just the price we will have to pay for our collective freedom.

Who is "we"?

As I see it, the criticism isn't directed at the goal. I think nobody is opposed to protecting children. Sure, HN crowd is obviously a very privacy-focused crowd, though I'm convinced that civil discussion is possible if the trade-offs for such a proposal would be a little more nuanced.

In this instance though, there is no nuance. There is no trade off. It's just security.

Also, implementing a law that kills privacy for pretty much anyone to protect children, while ignoring the elephant in the room [0] seems disingenuous at best.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse...

History has taught us a lesson. The USSR was hell on Earth, as was Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Privacy of communication is such an essential part of modern culture that any kind of power trying to prevent it is suspect.

Communications can only be suspect under a judicial order: otherwise the government is omnipotent because it can prevent anything.

And the inquisitions, and nazi Germany, and... Even when we don't forget history we get cocky and think we know better, that it will be different this time.

Except that the people who actually know what they are talking about when it comes to child protection disagree with you and the politicians trying to force this through.

According to the DKSB (Deutscher Kinderschutzbund) [2], encryption barely plays a role when it comes to the distribution of CSAM [1]. DKSB is not in favour of this.

You can pretend as much as you want that this is about children, that doesn't make it true. This was never, at any moment, about protecting children. Authorities already lack the resources to even go after the cases they know about, adding a huge pile of crap data to work through is probably going to make this situation even worse.

[1]: https://www.eu-info.de/dpa-europaticker/316232.html

[2]: https://www.dksb.de/en/home/

How does surveillance solve the abuse problem? The abuse happens in reality and only some of the results are shared over the internet. This is Zensursula once again, actionism with serious consequences without a real solution.

Countries like China and Russia will gratefully adopt the EU's rationale for its surveillance measures

Fortunately, this is one of the cases where HN is right, and there is no "middle ground". Child Abuse is bad but mass surveillance to catch it is terrible and will only be (haha) abused.

Governments are making it very difficult to respond in a more nuanced way, because they keep sliding down slippery slopes with predictable regularity when it comes to surveillance.

Measures are introduced to fight "serious and organised crime". The next thing your read is how they are being used against fly-tipping, dog pooping, benefits fraud, and random drug offences.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/08/revealed-anti-...

> Being dogmatic about privacy regulations without a solution for the abuse

Should all homes come equipped with always-on cameras, streaming to a government office, to catch abuse? Remember, you don't want to be "dogmatic" about privacy, not unless you can offer a *"solution".

*One of course ignores all the measures currently in place to catch crime and abuse, such as the police, social services, mandatory public schools with teachers and staff children can turn to for help, and all the many methods of surveillance, such as phone tracking, communication metadata, license-plate readers, surveillance cameras, etc.. All of this ceases to exist, and law enforcement is in a world of darkness because encryption creates one tiny corner where they cannot peek - unless they plant a targeted bug.

Because the situation is far more complex than this, and it's typical of governmental institutes to throw a blanket solution at it to increase resistance when it isn't at all obvious whether they will abuse their knowledge and power later in time.

You can teach these kids to take precautions, but you can't prevent them making mistakes if they still want to. Now you're weighting privacy and autonomy against lifelines to keep the ones who don't heed warnings from going off the deep end.

I think the problem stems from the fact we don't see abusers being publicly judged routinely, which gives a feeling that those abusers are very rare, and can't justify massive surveillance mainly because it's inefficient against any behavior not widely spread into the population.

That may be. It also makes it hard to reason about what could possibly be appropriate.

>It's clearly a hard problem and increasingly so

right, surely this is just a coincidence that it has become "an increasingly hard problem" now, at the time of civil unrest against increasingly authoritarian attitude of the ruling class

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