The thing is the Tech community doesn't have a clear and simple response to CSAM, although CSAM has proliferated with the growth of the internet. Nobody cares about the technical excuses; people care about the absence of any clear effort to reduce its availability and spread. Absent technical measures, people will continue to demand legislative ones.
The Automotive community doesn't have a clear and simple response to bank robbery. Nor are they expected to, because they are not a law enforcement agency.
https://www.sfgate.com/cars/article/Front-license-plate-cars...
This is exactly my point. Yet we have people trying to get tech corporations to act in the role of law enforcement, which they ought not to be doing and certainly ought not be to required to by law.
> nor have I ever heard anyone in that industry vocally minimizing the problem of vehicular crime to avoid some commercial inconvenience.
If you have people demanding that all cars come with government tracking devices under the pretext they could be used in bank robberies and someone in the auto industry notices that bank robberies aren't actually all that common, what should they do? Pretend it to be otherwise?
This is not a matter of commercial inconvenience. The economic cost of writing or installing the code is not the issue. The issue is that this is totalitarianism which once installed would not be limited to enforcing laws against child abuse. One of the reasons privacy is a human right is to protect the public against abuses of the state. It doesn't cease to be a right because the state finds it inconvenient -- the state is meant to find it inconvenient.
It also kind of defeats the entire concept of self-driving cars, which is that they can work without that. They have to be able to work in places with bad wireless reception or a power outage in the traffic control system, not only because of the single point of failure but because things like that could happen while the vehicle is in motion.
Meanwhile there is no legitimate reason to make them mandatory because people already have the incentive to use a system that provides quicker routes. There is no law requiring people to use Waze, but they do.
Measures against auto theft are well established to have brought down incidence of robbery, because it makes it harder to get a getaway car. And the auto industry has absolutely been given the responsibility of overseeing that.
Measures against theft are driven by the market because car buyers don't want their cars to be stolen. Some incidental effect on getaway cars is nothing they had an obligation to provide.
And it's questionable whether that is even true, because anyone could just steal an older car or different make with no such anti-theft features, or use their own car and steal someone else's license plate.
Does that seem reasonable? If not, then phone scanning probably is not reasonable either.
Do you know if actual child abuse also proliferated?
As far as I know, we don't have official numbers (at least not shared as part of the discussion). But what we know is, those scanners have a significantly high error rate and will overwhelm law enforcement with false-positives. What we also know is that law enforcement is simply not competent enough, there was a case in Germany where they just removed links in a Forum forgetting to sweep the according link targets to file hosters.
Your comment unfortunately exemplifies the problem of tech people trying to define the problem away rather than directly address the harms involved or propose privacy-respecting technical solutions to proactively mitigate it.
It is the primary reason that it's prohibited, outweighing any other reason by an order of magnitude.
> I find it hard to believe that a long time technology advocate like yourself is unaware of the fact that the circulation of older CSAM continues to hurt people who were abused in its manufacture.
That depends on how they feel about it. If it is the case that dissemination of existing material reduces the production of new material, no one could be faulted for wanting what they went through to prevent someone else from being forced to go through it too, if at all possible.
> Your comment unfortunately exemplifies the problem of tech people trying to define the problem away rather than directly address the harms involved or propose privacy-respecting technical solutions to proactively mitigate it.
There isn't any known privacy-respecting technical solution and it may not even be possible for one to exist. You can't tell if someone's secret is unlawful without knowing what it is, but anything with access to all of everyone's secrets is inherently a comprehensive violation of everyone's privacy. Any technological solution that could be used for this could not be limited to being used for this.
Fundamentally what you're asking for is the technology to violate everyone's privacy, so that you can violate the privacy of child abusers. But the technology doesn't care what you use it for. It can't be limited to only being used against bad guys.
Then you get the constant negligible sentences when "good" people are found to be pedophiles, the constant victim blaming in courts (apparently "well look how they were dressed", "they were drinking", etc are still real defenses in the US). Look at the abuse received by people who reported that "great" coach in the US, when suddenly sports was more important than child abuse. Then of course you have the constant church coverups that are routinely ruled legal, and then the victims get called scammers.
This is before you get to the abuse of children allowed by people who are trying to "stop their child being LGBT", which is literally torture, but again 100% ok because the people doing it are the conservatives who fight actual meaningful changes to protect children.
Instead what we get is police saying we need to have an unauditable system to report the content of people's phones with no warrant. Ignore the immense cost of false accusations, ignore the documented failures of these systems, ignore the incredible scope for abuse by other people (is it CSAM, or is just LGBT content? because plenty of US states and countries consider them equal). Is it reporting to parents? Plenty of child abusers will want to know if their children are looking at anything LGBT related so they have an excuse to abuse their children.
Or maybe it's protest pictures, or pro-democracy material - once you've shipped this for CSAM, plenty of countries will immediately say "now you can do that, also include this opaque database of criminal images".
Or it could be Iran saying "images of women without a hijab should be reported".
You need to understand, once you say "a persons device should report a specific kind of content on a device to any entity", the technology is in place, and the original "specific kind" becomes whatever the country says a legal requirement, and it's legally required to report to the government.
More generally, the EU has some stupid laws but also plenty of important ones that either bring greater good (safe products in the supermarkets, trade standards, common procurement rules, accountability of what national governments do on economic policy and debt levels, ...) or good for a specific sector (strong data protection and rights for instance, tech standards like usb c, etc). Here the discussion is not even about a law but about a proposal for a law where different people and bodies express different views. EU lawmaking is lengthy and quite transparent so you have these discussions often and at various points in the process, which is unusual compared to many national contexts. And it lends itself to viewing and overstating different views. It doesn't help that there are many lobby groups that sound like semi-EU bodies when they are in reality just industry groups of various kinds that make broad demands which are then echoed in the press as some kind of EU positon.
I'm sorry you've been led to have such a negative emotional reaction to the EU, but it just doesn't mirror the actual facts.
> which has no real equivalent in Europe
> which has no real equivalent in Europe
What a joke, now I know you're just trolling or are just that ignorant of history.