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Comment by 1f60c | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone in power thought through the scale of this? Even if it has a frankly exceptional error rate of just 0.001%, that still means tens of thousands of innocent Europeans will have their lives ruined every day. And, assuming there's a human in the loop, who are we going to traumatize to check The Machine's work? Is it going to be Kenyans again^, or Eastern Europeans this time?

^ https://theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-tr...

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In the proposal, they write that the service providers have to figure out a way to make the false positives reported to the police "minimal". This is obviously a major burden to put on the service providers, in effect completely excluding all small outfits (and I'm sceptical the large companies want to deal with this either).

Germany have had some similar tech in place according to Der Spiegel, but the entire increase in positives was found out to be legal dickpics and flirty messages between teenagers etc. The only result was that the police now have a huge database of teenager's naked pictures and kids on the beach, which can hardly be a good way to minimize pedophile activity.

It will be a shitshow beyond comprehension if this eventually gets implemented.

>Has anyone in power thought through the scale of this?

Why would they? People in power and judges are always exempt from warrantless mass surveillance. They get actual privacy.

France managed to get in an exemption in the proposal for their police and security workers, who can keep their privacy. I think the wording is that this would only apply to apps available to "the public". So if "the public" can't download your app, you're safe...

I think it just shows it won't be possible to implement this in a useful way. Let's hope...

Life ruined as in being flagged and investigated? Or as in, you sent some medical pics of your son's crotch to the dokter and some sicko on the scanning program looks at that photo and spreads it in his network?

Both I guess...

> you sent some medical pics of your son's crotch

and permanently lose access to your google acount, even after lots of stress and the police declaring you innocent[1]. Replace google acount by some other important thing.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...

I know the story, it's why I picked it as an example. I wonder how many humans have since seen the son's crotch.

Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.

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