If abuse is real and e2e is key to it, taking measures against abuse while keeping e2e is important. Fighting against any measure altogether is immoral
The closest approximation, is having a trusted client. This hashing scheme ruins the "trusted client" and I would no longer consider it e2e.
Not to mention that a database of hashes is trivially to expand with content that isn't CSAM. Next thing we know the European equivalent of the Tankman picture is included in the hash to more effectively pursue political opposition or activists.
This would destroy all ability to protest and singlehandedly eliminate democracy in Europe. I'm not exagerating. Climate activists in Germany are already put in "präventivhaft"[1] (preventive detention) before a civil disobedience / crime occurs. A scheme such as this would make it trivial to do at massive scales.
[1]: https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/staatsregierung-verteid...
If techies don't suggest any good alternative measure to prevent abuse then someone else will do it in a worse way and then welcome to panopticon. There's no black and white where tech touches human factor so learn to compromise.
How is there a modern epidemic of child abuse?
It's always lurked in the shadows alongside, for example, marriages in 1655 to 14 year old brides ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Pepys ).
If anything the modern age can be characterised by shining a stronmger light on the subject rather than sweeping it under the carpet.
The modern epidemic of abuse is a different beast. Never in the history it was possible to abuse a child, record the process or live broadcast it, and sell access to that to hundreds of people around the world. Technologies that enable this are only recently available (internet, e2e messaging and cryptocurrency).
But even if we pretended it was the same in absolute numbers, that is irrelevant. Yes, things were bad 500 years ago. If people were getting massacred today, you can say that it's all the same as back then, we should not be concerned, it's simply shedding more light on the same old murder. (It's especially easy to dismiss it if you were in the industry that makes tools for it). Or you could call it out as violence, even if it is happening less than in the dark ages, and try to do something about it.
If Democracy falls (which this would result in), everyone will be abused, including children. You can't solve a problem by making a worse problem.
You may want to open a history book and look at what happens to a society when it becomes a panopticon of total surveillance.
None of the other compromises of freedom (gun controls, cash controls, security checks) have led to a fall of democracy. In fact, they are requisite for democracies to thrive. You are blowing a minor inconvenience for yourself out of proportion, covering your ears, closing your eyes and shouting.
If we don't try, we are complicit in their crime by developing technology they use to fulfil their messed up purposes. Hope you sleep well at night!
> Continually eroding more and more security and privacy in our personal effects in return for less crime
How about you fight for your privacy and security in other aspects of life that concern yourself first (security checks, cash controls, etc) and then go after victims who cannot stand up for themselves.
Not at all. I want end-to-end encryption and I want complete control over my computer. I couldn't care less how hard it makes the life of police either.
The "measure" is they get the hell out there and do actual real police work instead of pushing a button and having your entire life revealed to them. There's a limit to how many cops they can spare to tail some suspect. There's no limit at all when computers are involved.
What made people do it before is mental illness. What makes people do it now more and more is additionally profit. The e2e apps and crypto is what drives their profit.
But critically there are ways of keeping e2e without being complicit in crime. Things like Apple's hash matching or requiring all messaging apps to do on device scan are that.
Pretending these compromises are unacceptable because they affect your privacy is a nonce move. You routinely compromise your privacy in much bigger ways in order to live in society, every time you are searched at security or present ID for verification etc, but when it comes to doing anything to help victims who unlike you can't even stand up for themselves you are suddenly the unyielding freedom fighter.
No thanks. It's bad enough that our devices often play fast and loose with our privacy as it is, but don't want my devices to be violating my privacy in ways where errors can have legal consequences for me.
Beyond that, these sorts of systems will always be increased in scope by people who want to abuse them for their own purposes.
I was not making a suggestion, I was stating facts.
Even things in the neighborhood of Apple's hash and device scans can only detect existing minimally altered images and also fall down to context if they try to detect more general issues like "nude children". We don't even have to get hypothetical about false positives of anti-CSAM measures [0] they're already out there happening. The devices are blind to context and the occurrence of actual CSAM are rare (blessedly) but there's a whole genre of "my kid did something cute in the tub" that look a lot like it without the context to a machine.
[0] https://9to5google.com/2022/08/22/google-locked-account-medi...
> There's no way to have cash that doesn't also facilitate crime full stop
Life is not black and white. You can have freedom enabling technologies like cash but you acquiesce to cash controls, maximum transaction amounts, personal searches if there is reasonable suspicion and so on. Same applies to e2e encryption or anything else. To think otherwise just in this case is a nonce move, you have not refuted my points in the slightest.
Violation of privacy in person is still bad. They can know your hidden illnesses or anything else people generally keep private. Something that you can't find out from texts.
There are plenty of examples where you don't need to be in person. Like financial transactions. You submit to your income to be disclosed to the government, and that the government will not freeze your money for no reason. The capability to freeze is key in order to combat profit from crime, kidnappings, blackmail etc. If you forgo that you get anarchy.
If you don't trust your government's checks and balances to take measures in public benefit, you should elect a different one. But the ability to take measures is important, more technical solutions will not solve a human problem as time always shows.
Any tool that is rendered not useful for bad purposes, has also been rendered not useful for good purposes.
There is no such thing as a compromise. It requires pretending (or ignorance) to imagine that there is even any sort of compromise logically or physically possible.
Exactly. Which means tradeoffs. Like cash enables freedom, it also means that there are measures to reduce its use for bad purposes (including maximum transaction limits, how much you can carry in/out of country, etc) that we all agree to. Like using public transport enables mass killings, it also means there are measures to reduce that (security inspections, etc). Like advances in science and tech enable cool gadgets, they also enable deadly weapons and that's why their export is regulated (sanctions, etc).
If you want to have absolute freedom, please go start with those things instead of child abuse. It's top of double standard to agree to compromise when it concerns your personal adult freedom, but not when it concerns innocent and powerless victims.
> There is no such thing as a compromise. It requires pretending (or ignorance) to imagine that there is even any sort of compromise logically or physically possible.
Dude, it literally does not follow from what you write before this sentence. Any tool that can be used for good can also be used for bad, and there are always compromises in order to restrict its uses for bad.
1. the "fingerprint" can still be silently updated to look for other things like [the current Power's that Be's definition of] "misinformation",
2. false positives can completely fuck over your life
3. it doesn't even work to prevent CSAM, because there will always be an arms race to improve the anti-fingerprinting measures. The "perceptual hashing" algorithms you've heard about don't actually work at all, they're a lie being pushed by commercial interests.
Those three points mean that even message fingerprinting is unacceptable, full stop.