> Am I being thick or is this not the explicit intention?
Well, yeah, it is the intention, at least on the part of the major proponents of that kind of surveillance, in Europe and elsewhere.
But if the people being "protected" don't share that opinion, it's worth pointing that out.
Even if you don't trust their judgement because they're "just kids", you should listen to them about what actual effects a policy might have on their total experience. You may not have thought of everything.
That's what the link is saying.
> I mean "exploring your sexuality" via picture messaging, or physically with another person would be a crime in most European countries if you're a child.
If you're 8, sure.
If you're 16, and the other person is also 16? As far as I can tell, "exploring", right up to actual sexual intercourse, is legal for you in most European countries. In a lot of countries, it's legal in person but illegal in messaging, but that seems seems kind of perverse, actually.
That's why there's a problem with the word "child".
At least when and where I grew up, if you said "child" in normal conversation, that meant somebody roughly 12 or under. If you meant people older than that, you used words like "teenager". "Child" meant under 18 in a legal document, but that wasn't true anywhere but in a legal document.
When proponents argue in public about "protecting children" on the Internet, they intentionally shift between those meanings. Nearly every example they bring up is about adults trolling for preteens, or maybe adults trolling for young teens. They hope that, when they say "children are being sex-talked at", you'll think they mean children in the sense of children. They try to keep the focus there, except when they want to quote big numbers, at which point they get a lot more inclusive about the definition, and may or may not mention that they've done so.
Nonetheless, the rules they actually write tend to apply to all minors, not just preteens, communicating with each other, not just adults.
In the same way, when they talk about actual activities, they talk about physical sexual contact, or about things that might lead to that, or about sharing obviously sexual images, or "dirty talk" meant to arouse. But the kind of "exploring your sexuality" that gets included in the rules isn't just doing things to arouse each other. It can end up including confiding in your best friend that you think you're gay.
Anyway, if it's surveillance you're talking about, it kind of doesn't matter what is or isn't legal. The point is that they want to spy on everybody's legal communication, in order to find some people's illegal communication.
Knowing that could have a chilling effect on anybody, but especially on somebody young. Maybe they're uncertain about how things work or what's allowed. Maybe they don't want to have to watch themselves constantly to avoid accidentally slipping over some line.
Or maybe they justifiably think they're unusually likely to get flagged, just because of who they are. There will be false positives under any of these proposals. A computer, or even a human, can't always understand the full meaning of some isolated message, without knowing the context. Suppose you generate a hit, and even suppose that, after investigation, "nothing happens". Still, is everybody going to be comfortable when the police, or some kind of automated system, call their parents as part of checking out the "lead"? Especially when maybe they were trying to feel out the very limits of their own comfort zones?