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Comment by hermannj314 | Hacker News Reader

Crimes are committed all the time using phones and yet, we do not allow phone companies to monitor, record and report the content of pur phone conversations. And they can't just add a line in a terms of service, they have no legal right to do it. (Ignore the issue of Metadata, I mean the audio portions of our calls)

So why have we accepted it is ok for all of our private electronic conversations to be monitored then?

These are horrific crimes descrbied here but all the solutions proposed reinforce the idea and start from the presumption that every SV company has a legal right to snoop on every conversation you have on their platforms.

I don't think you can have it both ways. If you routinely spy on your customers to sell ads, manipulate their behaviors and build sophisticated AI to make inferences about what every keystroke and mouse movement means, then you don't get to turn your head and pretend the crimes you witness on your platform aren't real.

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>Crimes are committed all the time using phones and yet, we do not allow phone companies to monitor, record and report the content of pur phone conversations. And they can't just add a line in a terms of service, they have no legal right to do it. (Ignore the issue of Metadata, I mean the audio portions of our calls)

Are you sure about that? It is my understanding all telco traffic are monitored. Some countries may have laws that prevent real time conversation/sms to be look at for a few months.

Correct, I cant speak for all the world. In the United States, only a party to a phone conversation may record that call. Some states have stronger requirements than that, requiring all parties to consent.

The phone company can't listen to your phone calls and there is definitely no public expectation or journalists demanding that AT&T and others do something about preventing crimes that used a phone by recording all calls and passing them through a Crime Detector (TM).

Ignore the illegal spying by US intelligence agencies on American citizens on American soil (past and/or whatever is still ongoing). Is this an example where the US may "let" a friendly nation spy on US citizens and then just gets that information from them?

So rather than the NSA hoovering up US phone call content, which they almost certainly have the capability of doing, they just let the UK do it for them?

That happened. Can’t recall the source however the UK was spying on US citizens and passing to the US through a “Five-Eyes” agreement.

Yes Five Eyes is what I was thinking of just couldn't remember the name.

Wire taps are a thing. I don't know the law around it, but it likely requires approval from a court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiretapping#United_States

Otherwise, telecom companies keep records of all calls that take place on their network - the phone numbers, time, duration, etc.

The phone company can't listen to your phone calls

Perhaps not explicitly legal but calls are monitored all the time after switch upgrades. We even applied US specific patches that disable the operator override tone that lets you know someone is on the call. I had to do this after every switch upgrade. One time that specific patch flubbed in a non obvious way and when I jumped onto a random call the people said, "Is someone there? Who is on our call?" and I disconnected.

For what it's worth, my boss had an arrangement with the three letter agencies to give them unfettered access to all the switches and we would even enable non-logging test mode to prevent any of their commands from being logged. My boss and most of his direct reports were not US citizens and one of them openly hated Americans so they did not really care. This was a couple decades ago so maybe by now everybody follows the spirit of the law.

This is an excuse that makes no sense. As the article makes clear, this is not happening only on private chat:

> It could, for instance, be investing more to develop better tools to “flag suspicious words and phrases on unencrypted parts of the platform – including coded language around grooming,” he said. “This is, fundamentally, not a technological problem, but one of corporate priorities.” (There is a separate debate about how to handle encryption. Meta’s plans to encrypt direct messages on Facebook Messenger and Instagram has recently drawn criticism from law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and Interpol.)

None of this is Meta's problem though. Requiring platforms to monitor user activity is unreasonable.

The main issue here is one of education. By 12 years old, a person should have learned enough about sexual exploitation in school that if a stranger asks them for nude photos, they would call the police.

I think the early generation of internet kids had trouble with this and other things like the permanence of Facebook, etc. Today, my kid and her friends are highly sensitive to "creepers," who might be lurking and their tactics. They are well aware of the pitfalls of posting on social media and all that. It seems society has adapted.

> It seems society has adapted.

Apparently not, going by the article.

> Requiring platforms to monitor user activity is unreasonable

That is absurd. Facebook spends billions algorithmically sorting their post, and they could spend a tiny fraction filtering them, just like they already do when required by law.

Facebook and Instagram do a significant amount of automated filtering. People from scammers to spammers to pimps have incentives to try to bypass the filtering. It's a cat and mouse game Meta has a significant incentive to stay ahead in; everyone from advertisers to app store owners to users will punish them for having too much of any of that, or even legal adult content.

Policing is the job of the police. If criminals are advertising sex with children on Instagram to the point that child molesters can find it, police can find it too. They can then use the low-tech method of posing as buyers, witnessing illegal acts, and arresting the offenders.

Instagram should provide assistance when legally required and technically possible of course, but should not be expected to perform law enforcement functions. That's not just because it would be some sort of undue burden on the huge corporation operating it, but because it lacks the checks and balances we apply to police agencies.

> phone conversations

What if you could call your local cell carrier and request SMS pictures of "underaged local girls" along with their phone numbers?

I think the public structure of Instagram is horrific, especially since they apparently allow unsolicited DMs. Even "private" chatrooms like Discord try to block random DMs by default.

And that is setting aside the public marketing of the girls, as nl pointed out. This is way beyond a DM privacy issue.

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