I am against ChatControl. But I am amazed by all the bullshit arguments that people find to criticise ChatControl.
If you have more control, obviously it's easier to track criminals. That's not the question at all. The question is: what is the cost to society? A few decades ago, all communications were unencrypted and people were fine. Why would it be different now? That's the question you need to answer.
This might catch the odd moron sharing stuff on Facebook or on their phone, but I doubt it will stop the average offender was is already going out of their way to use encrypted apps/services.
But okay great, at least you catch the morons I guess, but at what cost? Here in the UK it's pretty common to be arrested for tweets at it is. There's no doubt in my mind this will be used to catch individuals committing speech crimes who are currently getting away with it because they share their opinions behind closed doors.
I strongly believe it will catch the average offender. The average human doesn't have a clue about cryptography.
It won't catch all of them, of course. My point is that it is invalid to say that it won't catch anyone.
> but at what cost?
EXACTLY! The problem is that whoever controls the list of illegal material can abuse it. We fundamentally cannot audit the list because the material on this list is highly illegal. There is a risk of abuse.
Sure, but wouldn't they quickly learn once people are getting caught?
And predators who get in contact with kids have to do it over social media that the kids use. Those ones would be affected by ChatControl.
But privacy-less society will be implemented by then... Just a question: why they want no privacy at all costs ??
So all communications aren't stored outside of your device, right?
You also will not know if your message is flagged, so if you are ever in doubt about how your message will be categorized, you will have to assume that it will be flagged and sent to storage for an unknown amount of time
Feels a bit hypocritical to accept one and not the other.
Really, I think that the problem with ChatControl is that it is a weapon for surveillance. Not because of the false positive, but because whoever controls it can decide what gets reported. Depending on how a government evolves, that could be very dangerous. And we have examples of governments evolving like this in history.
And what makes you think we don't?
It's much, much easier to stop new incursions into our privacy than to claw back privacy we've already lost. And it's much, much easier to stop the government from violating our privacy than to stop megacorporations accountable to no one for anything other than profit from doing so.
I think seeing hypocrisy here is being extremely uncharitable.
IMHO there are valid arguments against ChatControl that are not "you see what you allow TooBigTech to do to you? Well with ChatControl you would allow much less to the government. Isn't that terrible?"
A strong argument against ChatControl, IMO, is that it builds a powerful tool of surveillance. Not because "someone fairly random will see false positives", but because someone in power (e.g. a president) could abuse it to maintain their power (e.g. by targetting political opponents).
I share your other concern, but I think it's related to the one I mentioned. Suddenly false positives turn into true positives, but for things that were totally unrelated to the initially stated goals of Chat Control.
So why are criminals not being tracked? Seems like there's a shit ton of cameras everywhere but stores are still locking everything valuable behind glass. The benefits of this stuff never seem to materialize in practice.
That's my point: there are good arguments against ChatControl. Better focus on them.
A few decades ago, a user base using whatever was available was about 99% lower than now. As well as governments were so illiterate that they could not read with the tech they had even those unencrypted messages.
a small number of units or individuals
But people are talking about both - the ridiculousness of the premise that this would help combat this and additionally of course the cost of privacy.
It's beyond encryption. Teenagers sending each other pictures could get flagged by AI etc. Any of your messages and images having potential to get falsely positively flagged.
The only valid argument I see against ChatControl is that fundamentally, you cannot know what it is reporting. It's not like if there would be an open source list of illegal material together with the hashes, right?
If you cannot audit what is being reporting (with whatever means necessary to make sure it is doing what it should be doing), then whoever controls it could abuse it.
That's the problem. That's the reason not to implement it. But it's completely overwhelmed by the flood of invalid arguments.
By definition, they must state what is actually illegal, lest I be hidden laws with hidden punishments.
And those lists of 'illegal' need to be publicly disclosed, so we are aware.
At least in the USA a naked picture of someone who is 17y364d old is 'child porn', but that extra day makes it 'barely legal'. But yet, most USA jurisdictions say that 16y can have sex. Just that pictures are EVIL even if you take them yourself.
Again however, I tend to more agree with Stallman that CSAM or child porn picture possession should either be legal or have a mens area attached, and not strict possession. Its proof of a crime, and shouldn't in of itself be a crime.
But because a picture is a crime, we get these horrific laws.
I don't need to murder you in order to say that murdering you is illegal, do I?
Of course they don't have to publish CSAM material in order to say that this is illegal CSAM material. If you could go get CSAM material at your local library, nobody would be talking about scanning it with ChatControl...
Again, we need to know the exact year and day. 17y364d is illegal but 18y is legal.
That picture does NOT have enough information to determine if its legal or not. And even as simple as 1 day can be the difference between legal and not.
And of course, is also thethe hypocrisy of sex being legal at 16, but pictures are 'child porn', when they are demonstrably NOT children.
So yes, MANY pictures already exist that do have more than enough information to determine that they are VERY ILLEGAL.
If you can't apprehend that, I don't know what to tell you.
Really? The only one?
I believe that politicians believe that AI models can do this well without negative consequences. But I also think they forget that a model with 99.99% specificity applied to ten million messages will still falsely label 1000 as harmful.
It is not the case anymore.
Or are you saying that we should not care about the others?
ChatControl will protect some kids. If your argument is "yeah, shit happens", you won't convince anyone. If your argument is "yes, but at a great cost for society", then you need to explain what the cost is.
Saying "your freedom" is worth exactly as much as "but CSAM" when said from the other side. It's not enough. What is the tangible risk of ChatControl?
Constitution says I can. The country is governed by people.
Is it worth it? Well that's the question, and I am against ChatControl so I think it is not worth it. But if you try to convince a politician that scanning every single communication cannot ever help law enforcement, then good luck. Because you are wrong.
Why not taking valid arguments against ChatControl instead?