"A temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive that allowed (but did not require) providers to scan private messages of unsuspected users for potential child sexual abuse material."
> EU politicians spend more time on chat control than on the reopening of Hormuz
I thought I'd heard it all here on HN, but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.
The US is now getting money from every ship passing the street. How people not see that for the US the world is a game of command and conquer. They rule everything and if it's not ruled it gets bombed.
Would've been so much better to reduce the scope of your comment to just energy security.
I don't see how the EU lived live with already higher energy prices compared to the US for so long and still don't make better renewable policy top priority.
To everyone who wants to dismantle the EU: this is not the solution. Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies. The UK left the EU and implemented its own version of chat control - Online Safety Act - without any transparency or real opposition. The right solution is the political fight. Europe is our home. We must keep it in good shape by getting rid of anything that makes it worse - like Chat Control.
Just think "neighborhood", no? This seems like splitting hairs... And to what end? to take a shot at EU supra-national structure? ("What, you don't ally to your country?" kinda shade.)
Maybe “your own city” would be a more precise metaphor than “your own house”. Your country is your house, but the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
The concept of a modern nation is also relatively new. It emerged as an identity for groups of people who were no longer defined mainly by the monarchs ruling over them. That identity replaced the king as the symbol of belonging.
But now nationalism is often doing the opposite. Instead of freeing people from old power structures, it is holding Europe back.
So yes, maybe it is not literally “your house”, but the point still stands. Burning down the city around your house is not exactly a smart move either.
>the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
If you measure "function" by the relative economic and military power of the country, then the EU has overwhelmingly degraded the function of its initial members compared to when they joined.
> If you measure "function" by the relative economic and military power of the country, then the EU has overwhelmingly degraded the function of its initial members compared to when they joined.
Very sure that when the EU was still in its infancy, we had only "west Europe" in arms, vs a USSR (aka all the eastern states and Russia). Now all those states are part of NATO and the EU.
Instead of the border to the closest hostile nation (Russia) being barely 100km from here, its now over 1200km to the first contact point.
That same Russia can barely deal with a Ukraine, that has some spare change backing from the EU. How is again at a war economy? Ukraine, sure, Russia, sure, EU ... nowp.
We now have Northern members that used to be neutral or not part of NATO, that are now part of it.
I feel like people love to misrepresent a lot of history. We have never been in a better position as a EU, vs what we used to be 40, 80, 100 years ago.
Yea, we have a lot of buildup to do again, but lets be honest, i rather see buildup now with modern kit for the modern battles, then relying on outdated 1990's doctrine and weapons. And even that is still a slow process with transitioning to the new reality of drones, drones and drones. Do not forget that 90% of the kills are now by drones.
People love to parrot those US talking point that often have no sense of history and our current EU reality in regards to security. While i admit, that we are still too reliant on US kit, even that is slowly changing. The EU moves slowly but it moves. Better then being some nations that are stuck in Imperialistic ways of thinking, like Russia.
Exactly. This is ridiculous behavior. Simple solutions for complex problems are usually the wrong ones.
One griefer which promised prosperit fueled Brexit, which caused Britain visible stagnation and now he is a candidate for MP promising to fixing it all yet again.
I need to repeat, that Simple solutions for complex problems usually do not work.
>Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies.
I don't like this comparison. Europe, the land of my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called the EU that does not represent me nor speak in my name.
Empires, monarchies, governments and all such man-made institutions like the EU get torn down all time, when they become too corrupt and cronyistic and lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people. See all human history.
Let's stop the blut and soil BS right here. I am all for european panationalism but don't pretend that Europe is "your house" where "your ancestors" were. You come from a very specific culture inside it which has its own specific language and traditions and that has spent most its history warring with its neighbours, sometimes people in the next village speaking a different version of your lanuage. My ancestors and your ancestor probably scarified each other, the land didn't
Turns out unifying a lot of different countries that have different languages and interest is a hard problem and in order to satisfy everyone a little bureaucracy is the price to pay. You may find it too bloated, too slow or even too corrupt but burning it to the ground is a lunacy for people who entertain clean slate delusions: Whenever it happens, it is a catastrophy for everyone but a few opportunists.
Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement. Now it can stay an economic union and big powers can pick and choose how to manipulate each one of us for their own purposes or it can strive to be a political union and have a standing on the international stage. We're not there yet but we will, eventually, we just need to hang tight. Things take time.
I'm just noticing that only European people seem to be disallowed from calling their land "their land" and outsiders "outsiders". it's "blut and soil", as if the men who fought Nazis fought Nazis for some high-minded ideals rather than their land and their people.
Oh, you're just noticing are you ?
Who are those people who are "disallowing" you from calling your land your land ? How do you handle living under such oppression ?
Just come out of the woods will you
It turns out people don't like to be invaded, yes, simple as. Of course you would very much like to convince everyone that immigration is just the same as an invasion and thus, the same way to deal with it is justified. So just say so instead of dancing around and posing as the victim.
I agree on the base of the argument. EU after all was created because of one tragedy. I'm absolutely sure that there will be more gruesome wars on the continent and I even wouldn't rule out the collapse in the future because petty tribalism holding everything back as always.
"Eurobarometer by the EU shows Europeans love the EU"
seems legit lol
Probably because most Europeans are clueless and brainwashed by MSM pro-EU propaganda, and never hear about the nasty things the EU tries to do like chat control.
To most Europeans EU just means going to Spain without borders and going to work in Germany for more money, anything else stupid the EU does never reaches them directly until much later.
>"Eurobarometer by the EU shows Europeans love the EU"
seems legit lol
Probably because most Europeans are clueless and brainwashed by MSM pro-EU propaganda, and never hear about the nasty things the EU tries to do like chat control, age-ID, car surveillance, or taxing parcels.
So which is it?
Are the stats fake, or are Europeans actually saying this because they are brainwashed?
Because you are trying to have both. First, official EU polling is illegitimate propaganda. Then, in the next breath, you explain why Europeans really do support the EU. That means the poll is not fake. You just hate the answer.
Every result you dislike is fake, and every person who disagrees with you is brainwashed. Very brave epistemology.
the eu has always been an instrument of american imperialism. leader like ursula was casted away of german politics for corruption and most of the other big names had ties to american companies like goldman sachs or’other financial institution. the eu is a prison for all of us. for a moment germany thought they could use it as an instrument to win and crush its biggest competitors (france and uk) but now they dont have an energy sector (lost thanks to their dear american friend bombing nordstream and foreign countries financing an anti nuclear narrative) and as such they now also lost the heart of their economy : their industry. the final nail in the coffin is spain opening the gates to millions of mens from less developed countries while major european economies have record youth unemployment.
its a crime against what was not so long ago some of the greatest nations on earth. now were as citizen are living under a distopia of urss with the worst of capitalism combined with the worst of communism. mass surveillance, removal of all personal freedom (freedom of speech, right to own property and cars, right to inherit, right to have a nation for our people, harshnpunishment for any contestation’up to jail timz for memes while at the same time very lenient justice toward murderers, rapists and other criminals.)
we gave away our right to exist and be nations and we did that without even a fight
russia was indeed the ones who pushed germany to be reliant on their energy instead of going for nuclear. they funded green party to do that. and germany on their side then voted laws and pushed eu to remove nuclear from green energies list so that france wouldnt have an edge against germany shooting themselves in the foot
The EU is beyond reform, this law targets exactly this: nascent political projects that threaten the status quo.
I believe that the EU will cause so much strife that the long peace we've enjoyed on the continent will be brought to an end, not because of the EU, but because of the wedges drawn between pro-EU and EU-skeptic countries.
Your assumptions clinging is staggering. Thank Reason that you put '(?)' preliminary marks - that you do not then follow.
> was that the EU itself needs to be entirely abolished
No, I wrote "should never have been born". Abolishing it does not remove the immense damages it caused. You are keeping your analytical processes very loose.
> If you apply that same standard, do you think cessation is what
Of course comparable cases entail comparable judgements?! But the USA, for example, about the destruction of cars the eu perpetrated, install 4-cylinder engines in the same models that in the eu are sold with 3-cylinders to stay within the regulations. So, not specifically comparable in the destructive effort, nor in the effect.
> []
Bad system, powerful entities that are systemically faulty hence damaging, must not be let into activity. As simple as this in principle - it is just logically self-contained.
That offensive law (every car owner must keep a breathalizer item in the vehicle ready for use) was famous in the "issued but not enforced" category.
But the mandate to keep "equipment" in the car is very different from kill-switches depending on sensors and embedded in electronics - the poster seems to have meant this.
by educating our fellow co-citizens about who to vote for. This is not an issue of the EU, but about the politicians in power and them caving in on lobbyists from economy side.
That translates to "capillary education, to the point of fixing structural systemic issues", measure needed generations ago.
We have damages now. The car systems destroyed. How would we be able to fix that, to revert from that and the rest of the damages - which they are carrying on perpetrating as we speak, inventing new.
This is not any more a matter of prevention, it is a matter of fixing the past and preventing the future predictable damages.
As a EU citizen I’m at a loss for what to do about this. I feel that they’re going against any average citizen’s interest. What can we do to make them stop?
Vote for parties that oppose this nonsense. In the meantime, install Linux on your desktop/laptop, and a free Android variant on a compatible phone. Use Signal, and urge your family and friends to do the same.
At this point I think it's obvious that EU is in turmoil. They're struggling to come to grips with the idea of a Russian invasion on their eastern borders, and simultaneously USA pivoting to Asia and not willing to front their defense after 40+ years of imploring them to do so themselves.
They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world. Russia, USA, China, India.
But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.
> They're struggling to come to grips with the idea of a Russian invasion on their eastern borders
Or rather struggling to hold onto the fantasy of a Russian invasion on their Eastern borders, when Russia has spent 4 years in order to manage to hold on to a quarter of Ukraine, entirely filled with Russians.
> But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare, and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.
They don't have to do this, they can cut public spending and invest (and aid private investment), but the EU is too weak to do this. What they're hoping is that spending on arms can revive their economies. They deeply need a looming threat to convince member states to do this. They should instead make the EU a real federation with teeth (and a real central bank), or call it a day.
The EU needs a proper way to get investment into technology, innovation and infrastructure, not to invade the east a third time (not that they're willing to spend the money on that either, no matter how hard they propagandize and censor.)
The EU seems to spend most of its time threatening to regulate things that it has no ability to produce, and is also not investing in its future ability to produce. It seems doomed to continue to be a vassal of the US, or if it wises up just a little bit, a vassal of China.
Well the Americans are not particularly clean in this situation. For them it's all about creating a situation where Europe keeps buying overpriced weapons from the US to support Ukraine in their slow march to death. Most euro leaders have sold their souls to the devil and live in a bubble of illusions and wishful thinking. They are all employees of the the American system. You won't even make it to the selection level it you don't comply with their ideas and morals. The only way out of this is a new wave that ditches the US completely and start doing business with Russia and China on a massive scale. Not gonna happen though.
> Also, EU countries in Eastern Europe do already have a high military spending, and even Western European countries are improving.
I would really challenge that idea that increasing military spending will create a solid and useful military force.
Most of the money you inject within the military industrial complex is wasted and stolen. At some point it can become counterproductive, we can see it with the US military where recently Iran’s $30k shahed drone destroys $300M US radars.
Note that today's politician never state goals in practical military terms but rather in billions and trillions spent. So they are always victorious.
I do not remember Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte or Genghis Khan stating their objectives in terms of money spent.
>I would really challenge that idea that increasing military spending will create a solid and useful military force.
Germany is the EU proof of that. It outpends France at spenign but its military is massively smaller and less capable, and also non-nuclear. So they're getting a very por bang for the buck. Mostly because of bureaucracy and corruption are eating most of their money before it gets spent on actually useful stuff.
>Most of the money you inject within the military industrial complex is wasted and stolen.
That's why I'm not holding my breath at the whole "German rearmament" propaganda. Most of the money will go to boost the stock of Rheinmetall and friends, not boost the troops.
>They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.
The EU is about twice as industrialized as the US is, In the town of Unterlüß of four thousand people Germany produces about half as many artillery shells as the entire US does (and nationally alone now produces more) and Ukraine and Europe have, for the last 18 months, defended Ukraine without about any support from anyone else. Where do you get your information about Europe, on twitter?
Well it's privacy from private companies. The government still needs to see everything you do just in case. Its not like you have anything to do hide? Do you?
I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
Meanwhile, the government can literally hold a gun to your head and ruin your entire life, seize your private assets/wealth, and take away your freedom.
These are not the same level of risk. Yet more hysterical attention is paid to the former instead of the latter.
Exactly. And it is also incredibly short-sided and naive to push for more power for the government when you think it is just going to be used by "your side" for the issues you care about. When you want to wield those powers to promote your own ends against those you oppose, don't be surprised when those you oppose come into power and use those same powers back against you.
>I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
I keep trying to explain to people that any data companies harvest, for whatever purpose, can then be accessed by the government, and that trying to draw distinctions in what is a big massive ouroboros is irrelevant.
Even if you trust the company AND trust the government, the data exists forever, and no one can trust all future governments and all future corporations.
The root issue is still government having absurdly asymmetric power over you.
If the government weren't legally able to use the toilet bowl cleaner companies data against you, it wouldn't matter.
The problem is us giving governments the right to use this data against us (passports to access the internet, messages being under constant surveillance, etc.)
In Europe we're happily handing over our rights every day so that governments have more power over us (supposedly to "protect" us from the big bad evil American tech companies).
Except, Google just wants to make $100/yr off me instead of $50/yr. Meanwhile, the government wants to literally control what I think and feel and do, and take out $100,000 in debt on the back of each of my children's future (we're at 115% debt-to-GDP in France) to fund this nightmare surveillance state.
Look trying to separate them is foolhardy. Corporations exist due the limitation of corporate liability provided by government. There's no scenario where you have a corporation without government. A corporation will sell you out wholesale to continue having the right to make 100 bucks a year off of people.
The law can change. Which is why it's better if that data was not collected in the first place.
Plenty of companies collecting data are operated by people who want to control what you think, feel, and do both for profit and based on their owners personal beliefs.
Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.
Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.
In general I would agree that say, walmart, is mostly interested in encouraging you to shop at their stores more frequently with the information they gather, it's also true that other corporations are currently selling the information they gather to the government.
And, of course, if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power, in the USA this would include things like state governors / attorneys, federal legislators, presidents, etc, all of whom have some level of influence over my information being collected and used.
If I dislike what walmart is doing, my options are considerably more limited. I can lobby for a law to be passed against it or I can essentially wish for it to go out of business.
> if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power
How has that been going? Did you manage to elect someone, who made a positive change? Let's be charitable - you can pick an example from your life that goes back up to 50 years.
Sure, Obama (and friends) got the ACA passed which, among other things, forbade health insurance companies from refusing service to people with "pre-existing conditions" as well as also forbidding lifetime caps on services needed for treatment.
Is it the best most perfect law ever passed in the history of humanity? Obviously not. Is it substantially better than what came before? YES. It's hard to explain just how screwed you were if you started getting hit by the "pre-existing conditions" disqualifier or your health insurance decided that they only needed to spend a million treating your cancer and after that you're on your own.
> Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.
No. My point is you should fear centralized power, in exact proportion to the scope of the power being centralized. All power gets abused.
Governments are centralized power on a scale that makes the most powerful corporation on earth look like an ant. Historically AND currently, the worst atrocities come from governments, not companies.
Yet, internet discourse (and new legislation) over the past 10 years has pretended like the biggest threat to us re: data collection is private companies. They are indeed a threat. But they are NOWHERE near the scale of the threat that data collection by governments represents.
This blind spot is part of the reason mass surveillance legislation is being rolled out (largely successfully) everywhere right now.
For example, we've created such a boogieman out of facebook/social media (which, ironically, doesn't even exist anymore as people remember it) that it has manufactured consent among the public for governments building the infrastructure for 1984. A far greater threat to us than micro-targeted face cream ads ever were.
So your position is that, because Coca Cola once funded paramilitary action in South America...companies are a worse threat to us than governments?
You don't seem able to hold two ideas in your head.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. Yes, governments can abuse their power.
However, the power wielded by governments is on a whole different scale, so the capacity for abuse and atrocity is exponentially larger (governments have killed millions and can literally destroy the entire world with firepower 100X over).
I agree with you on the general principle that we should demand better privacy protection from the government, its agents, and the corporations that claim its citizenship.
Arguing about who has killed more seems mildly pointless since it relies on a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations. Even aside from stuff like the east indies company, Hearst's newspapers helped create a situation where a war was declared, what share of the resulting death toll do they get?
Beyond that, something I've noticed over my years on this planet is that, generally speaking, power cannot be destroyed, only transferred.
What I mean by that is someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life, in ways that range from what color you can paint your house, where you can buy a house, how much you get paid, whether or not you get paid a salary, how much taxes you pay, etc etc.
I would, in general, prefer that the entity with that power be some kind of democratically elected institution, hopefully with lots of various internal and external safeguards.
As you say, we should be worried about the government collecting and storing our private information. But if we stopped them from doing that, then some other entity would just take over spying on people.
> power cannot be destroyed, only transferred...someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life
I fully agree with this, but that someone doesn't need to be a 3rd party centralized entity (like a government or company), the power can be decentralized onto you.
That's the story of basically all progress in the modern world.
The evolution from Monarchy/Dictatorship -> Representative Democracy was a step down this path (albeit a mild one).
The evolution of knowledge from Church -> Printing Press -> Internet did this, hence why I have to the power to publicly broadcast these words to you.
The evolution of media from Broadcast TV -> Cable -> Youtube -> Tiktok did this.
The evolution of commerce from Department Stores -> Malls -> Shopify/Etsy/etc did this.
Etc. etc.
Also, I think you're intentionally muddying the waters.
In fact it's extremely easy to make the distinction between "business" and "government," given the monopoly on violence granted to government. Proctor & Gamble has never held a gun to my head and imprisoned me for not buying their products.
> Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.
False dichotomy, they are the same Lernaean Hydra.
> I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
A reminder that governments can buy from private companies. A company like Palantir can buy data from private companies then incorporate it into the software it sells to governments.
> is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
And to steal tips [1], lower your salary [2,3], charge you more [3,4], and limit how you may use "your" property [5]. I'm sure there are many I've missed.
Oh the horror, they might try to lower your salary forcing you to find another competing employer!
Meanwhile governments wield enough power to destroy the entire world 100X over, and are currently shoveling young boys into the meat grinder of war to be slaughtered by the thousands every day.
As a left-leaning forum, HN has a giant blind spot re: government power vs. corporate power. I'm trying to point this out.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. But their power pales in comparison to government power.
The "right" is usually only against government control, intervention and surveillance until they get into power. Then they double down on them. Also right wing parties/groups are generally better at controlling and silencing internal opposition (since they are lot better shutting up and falling in line when push comes to shove regardless of their personal beliefs). So they are usually a lot more effective at imposing these things.
Companies fall under the government. So what a company harvests (to sell more toilet bowl cleaner), is accessible to the government it falls under.
By that logic, you should fear companies at least as much as their governments when handing them your data.
But companies have additional goals: to increase profit.
Which can be achieved by selling more toilet bowl cleaner. But also by externalising harm/pollution/costs, monopolising, reducing taxes, etc. All of which harm you, personally.
So, sure, worry about governments. But worry more about (big) companies. Read more history.
Governments have a monopoly on violence, companies generally do not.
This fact alone makes the comparison you’re trying to make pretty silly. You have far, far more to fear from the country from which you’re a citizen than the company for which you’re a customer.
Also, governments consists of a large amount of human each acting for their own benefit. Assuming they can easily collectively united as a single force to use violence to harm all citizen (on the topic of privacy, it really is the case) suddenly is wild.
On the contrary, for a limited government, it very likely will result in using the monopoly of violence to provide extreme capitalism style IP and private property protection which results in dominating power of large companies. On the other hand, every bit of history demonstrated you can never maintain monopoly of violence if you are really against people.
Monopoly on economic is strong because it can be guarded by violence, while violence cannot be easily guarded by itself within a country (unless AI overlord really comes).
That government has the monopoly of violence against the company too. They can easily strongarm the company into harming me.
With private security companies, private jails, private utilities, the harm both can and will do, is practically the same. And with the boundaries of "private" and "government" becoming more opaque (like private tech companies deciding who is to be detained and who not; who is allowed to access their money; or do their jobs, etc) the difference is even more theoretic.
A government that has absolute power over a company/sector, can (and will, in my belief) use that power to make the company/sector do it's work. Making this company/sector just as dangerous as the company.
If I get mistreated at an airport (of a democratic country), and the agents doing the mistreating are civil-servants, they (or their chain of command) are democratically held accountable. But if they are employees of Acme-Security Inc, granted the right of violence by the democratic government, there's nothing I can do, no-one to appeal to. Both cases are something I, an individual, cannot do anything against. I am mistreated anyway.
This is actually a fantastic example of the blindspot I'm talking about.
You fundamentally are unable to judge risk correctly due to your political bias.
You're even admitting the risk of companies harvesting data is that it may fall in the hands of governments.
Yet you still think a private company lobbying to reduce taxes is a greater threat than your government wielding enough firepower to kill millions of people and destroy the entire world.
That's a wild accusation. Unless you happen to know me, but I don't think you do.
"Lobbying to reduce taxes" was a part of an example. The big problem is their "lobbying for greater freedom".
Yes, governments should be held in check. Systems strengthened to keep governments afraid of the people (not companies) they govern. So that they can keep those that are stronger than me and use that strength to harm me, amongst wich are companies, in check. We have most of this in place. It can (and should be) improved. But we have very little in place to keep companies in check. Antitrust cannot (or is not) used against monopolies, (so the common free-market mechanisms of peoples free movement between suppliers aren't working anymore). Laws that protect humans against companies abolished or not modernized. Information (on which agents in the free-market must operate) is less and less trustworthy, mostly a result of companies spreading that (mis)information.
And TBC, companies have harmed people, are doing so as we speak, whole cities, whole countries. They have actively destabilized governments. Not just "somewhere in Africa", but in the US, in Europe. That's an undeniable fact. Many companies will then spend a lot of effort (and money and influence) to be not held accountable (that is harder to prove, obviously). Many companies will wield influence to be allowed to wield firepower, in all it's forms and shapes.
I am from a country with one of the worst examples of such a company in human history, the V.O.C. Who had such power that it had private armies, was accountable to no-one, grew so large that no "official government" could force it to do anything, for over a century. It literally enslaved people, killed inefficient workers, over-exploit and deplete entire ecosystems, etc etc. We should actively and strongly work against such companies from ever coming back (if they ever really left)
The distinction is very much blurred, and there is much more profitable way to use data than getting people to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
Companies can use it to determine voting patters and sell that to interested political parties. Government are made from political parties and can steer money to those parties, thus the data can now be sold indirectly to the government.
Companies can use it to indirectly target competitors through their customers. Creating a monopoly is much more profitable than just selling more products. Gaining favors with political parties in the above strategy can also help here.
Companies can sell data to governments of other countries. Just because your own government has laws that forbids it, it doesn't mean other countries has the same laws or will treat the citizens of your country as their own. Trade like this can also occur in multiple steps. Company sell data to country A, and country A shares/sells it to your own government. Your own government might finds this preferable to buy it directly as laws may not apply to data shared/bought, even if that data is about their own citizens.
Selling personal data to the government is profitable, but there are also other interested parties. People in legal disputes may want information about the other side, or the juries, or even the judge. Companies that want to do industry espionage would want to buy information about other companies employees. Criminal organizations very much like to buy information about vulnerable people like the elderly. Again, the data doesn't need to be sold directly but can go through many hands until it finally reach the most scummy buyers, and the money will slowly trickle upwards to the seller.
As long as someone collects the data and is willing to sell it to someone, sooner or later it will be sold/leaked to someone who shouldn't have it. That is the fundamental issue with companies collecting personal information.
I don't understand. How does it affect encrypted messages? It seems like either you need:
1. allow MITM decryption by a privileged authority
2. require all devices doing E2EE have a non-user-modifiable piece of functionality to scan on-device
The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner? I have to say that I do sometimes think about it while taking a photo of my baby playing in the bathtub - photos like my parents have of me which have been kind of nice to see later. It would be a pity if I had to have a separate analog camera just for baby photos because then I'd need to learn the whole developing film stuff.
I am not fully acquainted with the details, but I would not discard (3) make e2ee illegal, at least for platforms of certain size etc. That is what the proponents ultimately want anyway. If they settle for anything else, it's because of the resistance.
> The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner?
This is exactly what has been proposed. E.g. WhatsApp has a piece of code that scans images and texts before sending. After that, they are "encrypted".
This is of course a massive privacy violation, since the code that scans for CSAM can be switched out to scan for anything else at any time. (It's even easier to do now than when Apple first proposed it, as language models since have gotten good at reading images.)
Apple's proposal was only for photos being uploaded to iCloud and not local ones.
IIRC weren't there some thoughts that they'd switch iCloud to E2E but add local scanning on upload (compare to what it currently when Apple, Google, etc. freely scan all your cloud photos anyway). That didn't seem like a terrible deal on paper.
Does this mean every parent has to now make sure not to take pictures of their children playing in bath for instance, in order not to trip these scans for false positives?
No. iCloud Photos and Files are and have always been non-e2ee and they already scan everything in it.
Even with e2ee enabled for iCloud Photos/files (which NOBODY uses, and furthermore is entirely disabled in the UK), it sends identifying hashes of plaintext file content to the server without e2ee.
You are correct in that both option 1 and 2 are possible. For end-to-end encrypted messages only option 2 is possible. The content will be scanned directly on your own device and the data will be sent to the authorities without your knowledge, if the software detects something suspicious. This is called client-side-scanning.
The proposed Apple system was at least more restrained in that it was looking to identify known abuse images. Which is better than the Google one which aims to identify new unseen content which constantly flags parents acting legally sharing photos to medical professionals.
There are in betweens of an iphone and analog camera. You can use a digital camera with an SD card that you plug into a laptop that never connects to internet.
So the average person is having to set up an air gapped system to store normal family photos while while Epstein's clients and co conspirators communicate over plain text Gmail and for some reason we can't do anything about it.
The party that they want to ban is a consistent and loud opponent of chat control.
It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values. As a justification for blocking democracy it's universal and ever present.
This is a bit skewed. AfD stands for a lot more than "merely" an
opponent of chat control, including worshipping the 1930s era.
As another example, one of their members (Noah Krieger) fights on behalf of Russia, conquering lands
and killing civilians (article from today only in german, sorry:
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/videos-mit-schutzweste-u...). And
many other problems I could list about AfD. So t he "they want
to ban those opposing chat control" - sorry, that is a huge
simplification.
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values.
Ah? And why are there only two corrupt parties in the USA to begin with?
I mean that's no real choice. Both are corrupt, and one now entered
cult-status with the mad orange king. His cronies get rich. Everyone sees
this. So, sorry, but your attempt to promote the USA while praising the
AfD, is simply flat out rubbish nonsense. We only have bad actors here,
no good ones.
I think the groups pushing for these laws are largely right neoliberals. Historically, while being nominally in competition with both far-right and left, they have found it much easier to compromise with the right or mobilize against the left.
Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, AfD) is a party that wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them from the country. There are very good reasons they should be banned. Their opposition to chat control is completely incidental.
Sorry but I'm correcting your misinformation statement with the facts from a liberal leaning AI:
The line that it “wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them” overstates what appears in the AfD’s official national platform. Its 2025 manifesto proposes:
1. ending birthright citizenship for children of foreign parents;
2. removing the normal entitlement to naturalization based on lengthy residence;
3. generally ending dual citizenship;
4. deporting people without a legal right to remain, foreign criminals and people whose refugee protection has expired.
But it does not officially propose stripping all non-white German citizens of citizenship or deporting people based explicitly on skin colour.
The claim was that they want to deport citizens. The above list does not contain any entries that correspond to citizens. So unless you believe the above list to be incomplete or somehow otherwise in error it is a sound refutation of the original claim.
I'm inclined to vouch for the comment however I'm not clear if the self admitted AI copy and paste is in keeping with the current HN guidelines.
My bad, that does change things. Somewhat surprising that they would include that item as it alone tips the legal scales against them dramatically.
I was skeptical enough to look over the linked correctiv article and I notice that while those contacted are generally quoted as dodging most of the other questions they invariably come out against expulsion of legal citizens.
> And all those who campaigned for refugees could go there, too.
Are there any credible sources for this independent of the correctiv article? Because this Sellner character is approaching comic book villain level in their portrayal of him and thus I find myself not wanting to take the word of a single outlet.
I'm from the country Sellner is from - the same country Hitler was from! - and he is indeed comic book villain levels of evil. For example, he was in contact with the Christchurch shooter before he committed his terrorist acts.
Just read his Wikipedia article [0] and you'll find out more about his character, like this gem:
> Sellner said that Jews were a problem in the 1920s and made references to the "Jewish question"
> Are there any credible sources for this independent of the correctiv article?
Correctiv is a non-profit investigative journalism outlet that managed to infiltrate this secretive far-right meeting.
They are known to be gold-standard levels of credible and have won a ton of journalism prizes. It's not exactly yellow press.
Due to the very nature of it being a secretive meeting, their reporting is exclusive. Obviously the neonazis want to put on a nice face, so they didn't really try to get press involved in their plotting.
My intent wasn't to ask about that specific meeting but rather about the reported positions of the individuals involved. No matter how reputable I wouldn't want to take a single source as fact when the claim is that someone secretly holds reprehensible views in private that contradict what he says in public.
Setting aside the other attendees wikipedia more than covers sellner in that regard.
"Hiding your power levels" is a key strategy of the neofascist right. Make yourself look reasonable until you have enough power to do the despicable.
This explains why they are publicly denying what they are plotting in private.
Here's some choice quotes, translated to English.
"We must proceed completely peacefully and deliberately, adapt if necessary and butter up the opponent [literally: smear honey on their mouths], but when we are finally ready, we will put them all against the wall. (...) Dig a pit, all in and quicklime on top."
-- Holger Arppe, former AfD Vice Chair [0]
"The worse Germany is doing, the better it is for the AfD. [...] Therefore we have to consider a tactic between: How bad can things get for Germany? And: How much can we provoke? [...] Because then the AfD does better. We can always just shoot them all later. That's not an issue at all. Or gas them, or however you want. I don't care!"
-- Christian Lüth, AfD Press spokesman [1]
"It doesn't matter, nothing will change, even if we were to eat chalk [act harmless]. Even if we said: yes, we are separating from X, Y and Z now and acting moderate here."
Based on the political extremes in the US I had figured AfD would have its share of somewhat unsavory characters but this is almost comical. Are you sure the germans haven't confused meeting minutes and disney scripts? (I say, but then look at who we managed to elect.)
Yeah, as bad as unsavory characters in the US are, the AfD is full of straight-up, unrepetent Neonazis.
Like this is not just me mischaracterizing my political opponents, it is the most accurate label based on their behavior. They're the type of people who want to make the 1930s happen again in Germany.
This is why I react somewhat strongly when people try to relativize their abhorrence and make excuses, most frequently out of incorrectly mapping their own country's political systems.
I hope I could convince you that - especially given Germany's past and its commitment to never let this happen again - banning them is not some sort of political repression, but an immune response from democracy under attack. It is a manifestation of defensive democracy [0] , the principle written into the German constitution after the horrors of fascism.
I suspect most cases are like mine, not misunderstanding so much as encountering an exception to the default "safe" set of assumptions. When someone maligns a political party or institution it is usually partisan, emotional, and unfair. When encountering this, in the vast majority of cases the official position will be quite close to the "real" one. AfD secretly harboring a significant number of actual bonafide nazis in high ranking positions and actively covering this up is very much the exception the world over.
If you seek to convince people then leading with the sort of examples you linked me is probably the way to go. For those open to new information it cuts to the chase and the rest you weren't going to convince regardless.
The trouble with the german approach that bans political parties is IMO that it creates an easily abused tool that muddies the water. It's no longer so simple to judge a given situation since now you need to consider the content and context of the speech as opposed to merely whether or not it constituted a direct threat of violence.
Meanwhile I don't think it's likely to be effective for the stated purpose. In one scenario the extremists get laughed out of the room as a tiny minority. In another they hold the majority in which case banning them is extremely unlikely to work out favorably. Imagine if Trump who won the popular vote this last time around had been banned by the sitting establishment. There's no way we come out of that unscathed.
I think ideally, one would nip those fascist movements in the bud before they become big enough to be problematic. There's a phrase in German antifascism - "Wehret den Anfängen!", translating to "resist the beginnings". The Nazi movement itself also became really difficult to stop once it had some serious traction, one has to really stop these movements from becoming this big in the first place.
Problem is, the German Verfassungsschutz (lit. "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution", the domestic intelligence agency) was itself infiltrated by the far-right [0] and so didn't ring the alarm in time.
I agree with you that there's probably no way to come out unscathed from trying to ban them now - their followers are already radicalized and it probably wouldn't be pretty. But that being said, what else should we do? Just do nothing and let it all happen once more? Break our promise of never again? Watch history repeat itself? No - we have to at least try.
Germany has been very bad at resisting the beginnings. The actual Nazis seemed just kinda unfriendly and not that bad until suddenly they were that bad. There was a ten year buildup until the Holocaust.
> a party that wants to revoke citizenship of brown people and expel them from the country
As a white guy living in the middle east in a country that will never give me their citizenship, I do ask seriously, what's wrong with that? I don't know a single country in Africa, middle east and Asia that gives citizenships to foreigners. Ones that do, do under very very limited circumstances. Why does Europe and north America have to open their doors to everyone?
Your quote is very different from the situation you describe. Revoking citizen is different than no pathway to citizenship. A pathway to citizenship is not open doors.
Why would you care about democracy? Plenty of countries don't have it. Why should America and Europe hold themselves up to such naive, idealistic standards with Middle Eastern countries aren't doing the same?
That's essentially the point you made, while conflating pulling the rug out from under people's feet because they've committed the crime of being brown with never having made the offer in the first place.
> Why would you care about democracy? Plenty of countries don't have it
Because living in these countries usually comes with significant downsides for minorities. E.g. most middle east countries are limiting freedom for women compared to men.
The overwhelming majority of countries around the world have processes for naturalization [1]. They are often fairly onerous, but that is true of many European countries as well.
This appears to be blatant misinformation. They want to expel various noncitizens and remove or restrict various pathways to citizenship. It's important not to misrepresent others even when you vehemently disagree with them.
There are other (voices in other) parties that want to expel/restrict foreigners. There is a spectrum, and the AfD holds a rather large portion of the people tentatively agreeing with what you call misrepresentation.
How many people of their party must make such statements while being welcome in the party, for it to not be misinformation/misrepresentation.
the party program doesn't state it, but some high figures were caught talking about it. E.g. Björn Höcke and Maximilian Krah. They did not mention "brown people" as gp states, but called out people foreign to the local culture.
I mean, yeah. They push some things that would help - to sell its ideas to peole, but in the end if they got to power they would tripple down and do horrible things.
If the german government and its parties actually listened to people, the AFD would have like 5% and would be non issue. Same with all extremist parties tht try to latch on some idea to get voted in.
This party is far-right neofascists that are openly hostile to the democratic order and wants to deport German citizens to Africa if they're not Aryan enough.
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values
This is a limitation of the American two-party system that incentives polarization instead of cooperation.
We have a working multi-party democracy and a majority across parties and ideologies voted for this.
To think this has anything to do with Chat Control betrays either a deep lack of understanding of European politics or a conscious attempt to mislead in order to garner support for extremists.
Look, this discussion happens everytime an American looks at German laws.
* Germany has laws that restricts your freedom of speech. Yes, this is different from the US, because Germany had the Third Reich and Hitler. Hate speech and glorification of Nazis and similar is not allowed.
* Germany has laws that allow banning of parties that are against democratic values. "All people are equal as far as the law is concerned, no matter their skin color, religion or origin" is an important democratic value. Parties who are opposed to these values can be banned.
Now look at the situation in the US. Your "democracy" allowed to brainwash the MAGA voters by enough hate speech so that you now have the new Gestapo (ICE) running rampant, killing people, putting them into concentration camps. Your political caste is corrupt, shuffling money into their own pockets at the expensive of everyone else. You have elected an orange clown who threatens NATO allies with invasion, starts wars that backfire even on the US (not to speak about other countries), who is a child rapist, but apparently above the law.
So before you lecture other people about democratic values, I'd recommend to clean in front of your own door. He who sits in the glasshouse should not throw stones.
AFD is reactonary party, russian trojan horse, that just feeds on the Germanys government total failure to listen to its peoples needs.
Russia has of course a stake in using E2E, to communicate with their paid actors. But that does not diminish peoples right for privacy. We have a lot of info about russias mingeling but we still do nothing about it. No private chat needed.
Most everyone would love to see more work on stopping child sexual abuse.
But this is the ultimate "grant me dictatorial powers so I can do good" play.
Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law that suddenly touches everyone even though offenders are a small percentage and should be able to be targeted more efficiently.
Yep, and this is a perfect example of a base rate fallacy situation... even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
Back in the day when I was like 15 and DC++ was still a thing, I used to browse people's shared folders. One day I came across a file called "the paradox of false positive". It was a 1 pager that described how a machine which is 99.9% accurate at identifying terrorists would be completely useless due to this false positive base rate fallacy you're describing.
It really stuck with me throughout the years. It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.
Which begs the question: lets assume the intentions are pure (which we know they're not but lets be generous), what other options are there when 99.9% heuristic is not good enough? how do you design systems when they're guaranteed to fail as they scale up?
The intuition I've built is that you can't talk about a false positive rate being high or low on its own - it's always relative to the actual occurrence rate of positives in the tested population. E.g. if there's a 1 in 10000 risk of a false positive, but real positives also are only 1 out of 10000 tested cases, then a positive case will have a 50/50 chance of being a false positive (because for every 10000 tests, you'll have on average one false positive and one real positive). So a false positive rate can only be said to be low if it's significantly lower than the real occurrence rate of positives.
No I don't believe it does. I interpret 99.9% accurate to mean 1 in 1000 false positives. If 0.1% of your population are terrorists that means each alert has a 50% chance of being correct. That's nowhere near good enough to fully automate things but it is quite reasonable assuming this is merely information provided to a human agent.
Whereas if only 0.001% of your population are terrorists then 99 out of 100 alerts are false positives at which point the system is well on its way to being useless.
There is an important difference between scenarios where we care about the relative versus absolute frequency of errors.
You're right it doesn't. At least not completely. I was thinking about precision (i.e.: if the test is positive, what are the odds that its prediction is true).
It turns out, that accuracy is not defined as "true positive / (true pos. + true neg.)", but "correct predictions / all predictions".
The whole point of OP's statement: "It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.", which you actually support with your example.
> There is an important difference between scenarios where we care about the relative versus absolute frequency of errors.
The context is chat control without probable cause over the whole population of Europe with a low prevalence.
My point, and presumably that of OP, is that even a small relative frequency of errors will yield an unsustainably high absolute frequncy of errors.
> This is merely information provided to a human agent.
It will be in theory. In practice the human agent will just forward the decision.
A human agent is not sufficient; you need to test only with probable cause for the kind of scenario we're talking about.
The exact opposite of "Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0".
P.S.: The comment I originally replied to choose a very convoluted way of saying that the false discovery rate of the test matters for a proper evaluation.
I think we largely agree about being opposed to chat control however we seem to disagree somewhat about the underlying reasoning leading us to that conclusion.
> even a small relative frequency of errors will yield an unsustainably high absolute frequncy of errors.
That depends entirely on the rate of true positives in the general population and the rate at which the test successfully catches them. If the success rate is reasonably high and the rate of true positives is within one base ten order of magnitude of the rate of false positives then regardless of volume the stream of reports would be expected to prove quite useful.
To put this in concrete terms, if 1 billion messages are scanned, there are 100 violations, 99 of those violations are successfully detected, and there are an additional 1000 false positives reported, then you've got about a 10% hit rate when examining reports. That would provide a genuinely useful starting point.
But it's not at all clear that we can expect numbers like that. Both because the scanners are likely much worse but also because criminals can't reasonably be expected to stick around on conforming platforms in the event that such measures are enacted.
Even if the reports were 100% accurate I'd still be opposed to it on ideological grounds. I don't think pervasive surveillance of that nature is compatible in the long term with a free and democratic system of government.
> Both you and they explain this by throwing numbers without context in combination with slightly inaccurate definitions.
It was my intent to provide reasoning for all the numbers I put forward. They were meant as examples.
As to definitions I wasn't going by anything formal. I tried to spell out exactly what I meant by each term. Apologies if I wasn't entirely clear about that. Regardless, the precise definitions of the terms aren't what matters here. It's the practical end result - what percentage of the alerts are false?
It really doesn’t, and it is easy to demonstrate by using an extreme example.
Suppose I invent a device that can detect whether there is a giant invisible dragon living in your house, and it has an accuracy of 99.999%
Now, I use it in your house and it tells me there is an invisible dragon… so what are the chances that there is a dragon in your house?
Based on your statement, it would be 99.999% likely that there is an invisible dragon in your house. However, we actually know that there is a 0% chance there is an invisible dragon, so even with the positive test result we still know there is a 0% chance a dragon is there.
It's been working for tens of thousands of years. What changed in the last few decades wasn't parenting or technology. It was the rise of the nanny state where the parents gave up the parenting of their kids as modern life is too time consuming to leave any room for real parenting.
It both works and fails, like many other things. But if you hold the goal that it must never fail in sufficiently high esteem, you invariably end up with a system like the one we have now.
If the goal of a system is to never fail, then the bureaucrats in charge of running that system will just game the metrics and cover up all the issue, while it slowly fails.
I genuinely think it’s all 3. The cultural side is parental expectations; political side is nanny states and academic institutions that the public expects to not only teach but raise their kids; and technology, especially the Internet, social media, and short form content, distract and isolate both kids and parents.
The all too common trope of “nosy neighbors call CPS because the family next door lets their kids walk to school, whole family traumatized as a result” is the perfect encapsulation of all three factors
I think if you were able to get accurate statistics on rates of sexual abuse for the last few thousand years you'd find there's a baseline that we don't seem to ever learn to do better than.
Yes it does. If you're of the mindset that drives one to build a nanny state that is. My assumption is the mindset is that any amount of CSA is completely intolerable and that we must try to reach zero cases and there can be no other goal. If that's the framing then parenting alone fails miserably at it.
I think that's a terrible goal, because it leads to the nanny state.
Do you realise the solution is just to accept some kids will wind up as collateral because parenting alone can't solve it, and rather than trying to solve it through technology (which won't work anyway) we have to accept that we'd rather have the crime and our freedom? We can't kid ourselves that parenting is a solution, just as we shouldn't kid ourselves that technology isn't either. The answer is maybe stop thinking of the children.
Sorry, your POV wasn't entirely clear to me from your original comment.
Of course I'm on your side here, there should be a healthy balance, which modern child micromanagement, and zealous survellance in general, are quite an opposite of. Saying this as someone who survived my happy 80-90-s childhood, roaming freely wherever we wanted with my friends, doing kid things many modern parents would be terrified of, like climbing various industrial structures, crashing on our bikes and sleds and whatnot. And still being a good homeboy in the eyes of my parents and neghbours.
One can't turn the world into a perfectly safe utopia without turning it into complete dystopia in the process. Education and culture is what makes it safe without such side effects.
Not a single person that is not attached to EU voted for he. She is second hand vote. These roles should all be result of direct vote. This way you only get votes by people who are sucking the money of Eu parliament or. The only position people vote for is EP. And that % is so small, that if they ask the people who didn't vote if they want it, they would have to tear it down.
I am not against EU cooperation, mainly in external security and free market economy. But the system we have is not very democratic, and def not very representative of people. They act like demigods, elected by parliament with no real consequences of their actions.
The president of the European Commission is “elected” through a thin pretence of democracy that the people of Europe have effectively no control over, and mostly pay no attention to. If you think she’s there because the greater public decided she’s the best person for the job then you don’t know how the EU works.
Also most of the EU population don’t know her for anything at all. I’d be surprised if more than 50% of Europeans could name her.
Really depends on the downside of a false positive.
If the 99.9% accuracy means the volume that requires manual or additional review is reduced by a factor of 1000, that’s a win.
Of course if a false positive means ruining someone’s life as in this case, it’s generally more a problem of how the classifier results are handled than anything else.
And often, it’s false negative rate that is the real problem. You can often build a 99.9% classifier by simply returning False, which is obviously useless (or equivalent to not testing and assuming some miss rate). If you’re dealing with consequential “failures” (of whatever kind) the most important thing is usually not missing any.
Again, none of that really applies here because the whole premise is stupid.
> even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
No. If the scanner is 99.99% accurate, then most matches will be correct.
Even if 10% of population were actively criminal pedos (which is waaaay too high), its pretty safe to assume that the majority of even their online footprint would be ordinary images/messages.
So a quota of 0.1% or even less material being detectably criminal sounds realistic (probably not much less, though).
If you scan 1,000,000 pictures (with let's say 10 CSAM), you'll have 100 false positives and 10 true positives, giving you like only 10% correct results
Ah, sorry, I misread what the OP meant by "matches" - thought they were referring to all classifier outputs, while they specifically meant the positives.
Bonferonni is relevant when you calculate a p-value. Most statistical tests are used with a p-value threshold of 5% to reject the null-hypothesis. But because you are repeatedly testing, the probability for false positives increases and that is why you need to decrease the threshold and make it harder, to obtain a p-value below that threshold to declare a significant result.
Google have already caused significant hardship to a father for such kinds of photos. What's particularly galling is how they've continued to maintain they were in the right, despite the police saying no crime had been committed.
Of course google and every other big-tech platform is gonna insta-wipe every account containing detected nudes of children, regardless if you're the parent.
The corporate liability of such content being found on their cloud is so insanely nuclear, that they're not gonna wait and ask you "hey are those nudes your own kids or are you a pedo?"
And yet the will badger you endlessly to the point their photos app is near unusable to turn on auto sync which slurps up every photo and makes it very awkward to then delete them after. To me, this makes Google a liable party even if real CSAM is stored.
The bad consequences are diffuse, abstract and distant (conspiracy-looking, tinfoil-like), while it's very easy to viscerally understand that "even if they just save one child, it's already worth it".
They should give precise numbers of how many such crimes are detected via such means or are expected to be detected per year, and how many of those are not possible to catch through regular investigative work. It just seems ridiculously out of proportion especially that with all this flurry around the topic, the criminals surely aren't using WhatsApp for this any more, but especially won't be once the law is adopted. Sure, many are likely stupid but if they are so stupid, won't they fall into other honeypots?
Why are chat apps the best leverage for uncovering this? They'd have to justify this with some sort of data and numbers.
Because later they can just come back and say, well unfortunately they are now all using other means, so now we need to break https,we need to ban e2e, we need to ban vpns, tor and foss operating systems etc etc.
They should add to those metrics: hours and funds wasted investigating false positives, reputations ruined from false accusations and investigations, decline in public trust, etc.
Yeah, and also how many such crimes are actually prosecuted because you know, there is certain island with certain high-ranked people.
Anyways, once that implemented noone will report to you and there will be no means of pushing against it because all your online efforts to coordinate will be compromised.
Mencken just has the best quotes. Here's a few of my favorites:
> The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
> For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
> Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
If you want the guns, then yes. I come from somewhere without guns, and as a result without school shootings. Nobody here wants guns as a part of everyday life. America seems to want them.
I have put up a list of all the MEPs who voted for the urgency procedure yesterday (in breach of EU rules) as well as their voting history on fundamental rights issues and who has been lobbying them:
Not sure why, it is working fine everywhere else - I see in Tor it gives an invalid certificate error, but the Lets Encrypt certificate is working fine in other browsers, so seems to be a Tor thing specifically.
I cannot see what is causing the issue, the certificate's full chain is sent, the clock is synced, the cert is showing zero errors in OpenSSL - so this is very confusing.
The irony is, you don't actually need Tor on my site because there is no logging, no third parties, no adtech etc. it is just static HTML files - so whereas I would normally recommend Tor I designed the site specifically to be privacy first.
I will try to figure out what is going on though because obviously I am fully supportive of people protecting their privacy with Tor.
OK it should be fixed now - there was a rate limit which doesn't normally land but due to multiple Tor users coming through the same exit node, it was triggering the limit.
Nothing to do with the certs just told me a cert error because it never finished the handshake.
I tested through Tor on multiple machines now and multiple circuits and is working clean - thanks for the heads up.
its also just disastrous for signal to noise ratios. scanning everything means any sort of error rate is going to cause massive amounts of incorrect labelling. this means innocent things getting flagged and put into a system where people are treated like offenders when they arent until they can get an actual human with authority to review their circumstances (not guaranteed to happen at all btw), or some actual offenders get away with more bc they passed a scan
outlier cases aside, there is also just a large amount of processing power that will go into this, the service can only be worse off for it. Privacy is not just about being able to hide things, it is also about being in control of how you present to the world. not because that control is maniupulative but because we all exist within our own microcosms of uniqueness, using words slightly differently than each other, and having certain balances of intention and meaning with those we send messages to that cannot be fully presumed from a 3rd party. even in images.
Are they really saying "if you want to send private messages then go make your own network" ?
Even if there was no lobbying or corruption, the EU is structurally flawed: the Council, which is made up of 27 mandates that were given for local politics, is used by nations to launder their domestically unpopular laws through an EU indirection layer, the Commission has no electoral link (VDL was appointed, when afaik the Parliament should nominate a Commission President), the Parliament, the legislative body, has no legislative initiative, and despite rejecting laws drafted by the Commission, as we've seen, those laws can be forced through indefinitely until the Commission gets the rubber stamp it needs.
i think a good general rule is anyone with ultimate power over some area (president, lawmakers, supreme court judges) should be elected. thats anyone whos decisions cant be reversed by someone else above them. those who make final but reversible decisions (pm, ministers, heads of military and intelligence) should be directly appointed by someone who was elected. if you allow indirect appointments to important positions you get a corrupt undemocratic government.
When it comes to online actions people ask for way more than reasonable. You dont get to be an invisible, impossible to track, unaccountable hacker man free to roam the internet on equal footing to the rest of the users.
This is a strawman argument. Almost no one who wants to preserve their right to free and open communication without government knowledge or interference, wants that so that they can hack.
It’s not about catching hackers or child predators, it’s about government control.
The same governments pushing for this type of regulation are also the ones that fail to condemn high profile individuals involved in the crimes that these regulation are supposed to help fight. Makes you really wonder if it's about protecting the children.
There are plenty of friends of that one famous financier roaming the old continent, who probably won't ever see a courtroom or prison cell in their lifetime, despite a lot of incriminating evidence.
People (well, the European Parliament, which is arguably the closest approximation) have clearly and repeatedly opposed Chat Control.
The Commission is an expression of _governments_ (and this one in particular is the result of painstaking compromise) and is only loyal to presidents and prime ministers. It has no accountability to the EP, and it shows.
They could make all e2ee chats, group chats. Where instead of a 1-1 chat between two people or many-many chat between a lot of people, they do 1-1+1 or many-many+1, where the +1 is the government. Technically the underlaying company or anyone else still won't have access to messages and e2ee won't be "broken", except for the fact that there's one more party in the key exchange.
Or they scan at the edge on the user's device.
Either way, both are very prone to false positives and and very much privacy invading.
Scan on end user's devices, but never transmit the result of that. Only report it ON the device itself to the user. A false positive when you send a pic of your naked kid to your spouse might show a warning icon asking you if you are sure you want to send it.
Also: for minors (Who is a minor not determined by some central age verification, but by me specifying in the Apple/Android family settings who my kids are) you could make sending certain things it blocking or subject to parent approval. E.g. if my daughter is tricked into sending nudes, it's something that's handled the same as if she wants to install an app or visit a specific web page.
No encryption is ever backdoored. Anything beyond this, e.g. reporting any user actions, would be allowed only through a court, just like any wiretapping always was.
Voluntary for whom? The service provider? Can I opt out of getting scanned?
> Does it touch encrypted messages? - No. End-to-end encrypted communications were never scanned but providers could deploy client-side scanning under this law.
So it circumvents e2e encryption?
---
How would these laws prevent me from just side loading my own open source client?
You need open hardware and open software at that point and you won't be able to use government identification as they depend on closed source parts of the Android ecosystem. Also you need identification for side loading apps at some point.
Non of these laws stop you from opting out of surveillance, but altogether it gets so hard that at some point you get more suspicious and tracked if you do all this than if you don't do any of these.
307 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadChat Control passed first round in EU Parliament
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819008
"A temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive that allowed (but did not require) providers to scan private messages of unsuspected users for potential child sexual abuse material."
Does that imply it's currently not allowed?
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195338
They did id sneakily.
https://www.politico.eu/article/president-vs-parliament-robe...
As I understand it, there will still be another related vote on Thursday, so call your representatives!
Not for the last few months, no; Chat Control 1 expired.
I thought I'd heard it all here on HN, but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.
We aren't done yet. Game on after the midterms.
I don't see how the EU lived live with already higher energy prices compared to the US for so long and still don't make better renewable policy top priority.
-- Canadian
The concept of a modern nation is also relatively new. It emerged as an identity for groups of people who were no longer defined mainly by the monarchs ruling over them. That identity replaced the king as the symbol of belonging.
But now nationalism is often doing the opposite. Instead of freeing people from old power structures, it is holding Europe back.
So yes, maybe it is not literally “your house”, but the point still stands. Burning down the city around your house is not exactly a smart move either.
If you measure "function" by the relative economic and military power of the country, then the EU has overwhelmingly degraded the function of its initial members compared to when they joined.
Very sure that when the EU was still in its infancy, we had only "west Europe" in arms, vs a USSR (aka all the eastern states and Russia). Now all those states are part of NATO and the EU.
Instead of the border to the closest hostile nation (Russia) being barely 100km from here, its now over 1200km to the first contact point.
That same Russia can barely deal with a Ukraine, that has some spare change backing from the EU. How is again at a war economy? Ukraine, sure, Russia, sure, EU ... nowp.
We now have Northern members that used to be neutral or not part of NATO, that are now part of it.
I feel like people love to misrepresent a lot of history. We have never been in a better position as a EU, vs what we used to be 40, 80, 100 years ago.
Yea, we have a lot of buildup to do again, but lets be honest, i rather see buildup now with modern kit for the modern battles, then relying on outdated 1990's doctrine and weapons. And even that is still a slow process with transitioning to the new reality of drones, drones and drones. Do not forget that 90% of the kills are now by drones.
People love to parrot those US talking point that often have no sense of history and our current EU reality in regards to security. While i admit, that we are still too reliant on US kit, even that is slowly changing. The EU moves slowly but it moves. Better then being some nations that are stuck in Imperialistic ways of thinking, like Russia.
One griefer which promised prosperit fueled Brexit, which caused Britain visible stagnation and now he is a candidate for MP promising to fixing it all yet again.
I need to repeat, that Simple solutions for complex problems usually do not work.
I don't like this comparison. Europe, the land of my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called the EU that does not represent me nor speak in my name.
Empires, monarchies, governments and all such man-made institutions like the EU get torn down all time, when they become too corrupt and cronyistic and lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people. See all human history.
Turns out unifying a lot of different countries that have different languages and interest is a hard problem and in order to satisfy everyone a little bureaucracy is the price to pay. You may find it too bloated, too slow or even too corrupt but burning it to the ground is a lunacy for people who entertain clean slate delusions: Whenever it happens, it is a catastrophy for everyone but a few opportunists.
Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement. Now it can stay an economic union and big powers can pick and choose how to manipulate each one of us for their own purposes or it can strive to be a political union and have a standing on the international stage. We're not there yet but we will, eventually, we just need to hang tight. Things take time.
do you feel the same way when Africans speak of Africa?
Can you provide me with some example of something that you think I would not disapprove of and that amounts the exactly the same thing ?
Or maybe can you try to defend the blood and soil rethoric (call it the way you want) instead of a drive-by comment ?
Just come out of the woods will you
It turns out people don't like to be invaded, yes, simple as. Of course you would very much like to convince everyone that immigration is just the same as an invasion and thus, the same way to deal with it is justified. So just say so instead of dancing around and posing as the victim.
>Who are those people who are "disallowing" you from calling your land your land ?
But this is the hatred you are talking about?
https://www.politico.eu/article/europeans-embrace-eu-gloom-w...
seems legit lol
Probably because most Europeans are clueless and brainwashed by MSM pro-EU propaganda, and never hear about the nasty things the EU tries to do like chat control.
To most Europeans EU just means going to Spain without borders and going to work in Germany for more money, anything else stupid the EU does never reaches them directly until much later.
seems legit lol
Probably because most Europeans are clueless and brainwashed by MSM pro-EU propaganda, and never hear about the nasty things the EU tries to do like chat control, age-ID, car surveillance, or taxing parcels.
So which is it?
Are the stats fake, or are Europeans actually saying this because they are brainwashed?
Because you are trying to have both. First, official EU polling is illegitimate propaganda. Then, in the next breath, you explain why Europeans really do support the EU. That means the poll is not fake. You just hate the answer.
Every result you dislike is fake, and every person who disagrees with you is brainwashed. Very brave epistemology.
its a crime against what was not so long ago some of the greatest nations on earth. now were as citizen are living under a distopia of urss with the worst of capitalism combined with the worst of communism. mass surveillance, removal of all personal freedom (freedom of speech, right to own property and cars, right to inherit, right to have a nation for our people, harshnpunishment for any contestation’up to jail timz for memes while at the same time very lenient justice toward murderers, rapists and other criminals.)
we gave away our right to exist and be nations and we did that without even a fight
I believe that the EU will cause so much strife that the long peace we've enjoyed on the continent will be brought to an end, not because of the EU, but because of the wedges drawn between pro-EU and EU-skeptic countries.
> Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera (allaboutcookies.org)
the eu should never have been born. The above are its results - and just an example. How do we fix that disaster?
Did they? That makes a good amount of difference, you know. Especially when "they" may be a vocal exception.
> How is this supposed to prove anything
Prove what. Nothing seems to be disproven.
Your assumptions clinging is staggering. Thank Reason that you put '(?)' preliminary marks - that you do not then follow.
> was that the EU itself needs to be entirely abolished
No, I wrote "should never have been born". Abolishing it does not remove the immense damages it caused. You are keeping your analytical processes very loose.
> If you apply that same standard, do you think cessation is what
Of course comparable cases entail comparable judgements?! But the USA, for example, about the destruction of cars the eu perpetrated, install 4-cylinder engines in the same models that in the eu are sold with 3-cylinders to stay within the regulations. So, not specifically comparable in the destructive effort, nor in the effect.
> []
Bad system, powerful entities that are systemically faulty hence damaging, must not be let into activity. As simple as this in principle - it is just logically self-contained.
But the mandate to keep "equipment" in the car is very different from kill-switches depending on sensors and embedded in electronics - the poster seems to have meant this.
We have damages now. The car systems destroyed. How would we be able to fix that, to revert from that and the rest of the damages - which they are carrying on perpetrating as we speak, inventing new.
This is not any more a matter of prevention, it is a matter of fixing the past and preventing the future predictable damages.
>Europe is our home.
At the same time parts of my country feel less and less like home if at all and those politicians really hate adressing it.
Then there's the whole kerfuffle about how to actually implement this
So the thing that comforts me is that it's a dumpster fire all the way down and I'm sure there will be plenty of legal complaints about it
They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world. Russia, USA, China, India.
But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.
Go demand that the original poster provides value.
Otherwise you're just a defender of bullshit.
Or rather struggling to hold onto the fantasy of a Russian invasion on their Eastern borders, when Russia has spent 4 years in order to manage to hold on to a quarter of Ukraine, entirely filled with Russians.
> But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare, and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.
They don't have to do this, they can cut public spending and invest (and aid private investment), but the EU is too weak to do this. What they're hoping is that spending on arms can revive their economies. They deeply need a looming threat to convince member states to do this. They should instead make the EU a real federation with teeth (and a real central bank), or call it a day.
The EU needs a proper way to get investment into technology, innovation and infrastructure, not to invade the east a third time (not that they're willing to spend the money on that either, no matter how hard they propagandize and censor.)
The EU seems to spend most of its time threatening to regulate things that it has no ability to produce, and is also not investing in its future ability to produce. It seems doomed to continue to be a vassal of the US, or if it wises up just a little bit, a vassal of China.
Also, EU countries in Eastern Europe do already have a high military spending, and even Western European countries are improving.
The situation is less than ideal but not hopeless.
I would really challenge that idea that increasing military spending will create a solid and useful military force.
Most of the money you inject within the military industrial complex is wasted and stolen. At some point it can become counterproductive, we can see it with the US military where recently Iran’s $30k shahed drone destroys $300M US radars.
Note that today's politician never state goals in practical military terms but rather in billions and trillions spent. So they are always victorious. I do not remember Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte or Genghis Khan stating their objectives in terms of money spent.
Germany is the EU proof of that. It outpends France at spenign but its military is massively smaller and less capable, and also non-nuclear. So they're getting a very por bang for the buck. Mostly because of bureaucracy and corruption are eating most of their money before it gets spent on actually useful stuff.
>Most of the money you inject within the military industrial complex is wasted and stolen.
That's why I'm not holding my breath at the whole "German rearmament" propaganda. Most of the money will go to boost the stock of Rheinmetall and friends, not boost the troops.
The EU is about twice as industrialized as the US is, In the town of Unterlüß of four thousand people Germany produces about half as many artillery shells as the entire US does (and nationally alone now produces more) and Ukraine and Europe have, for the last 18 months, defended Ukraine without about any support from anyone else. Where do you get your information about Europe, on twitter?
Meanwhile, the government can literally hold a gun to your head and ruin your entire life, seize your private assets/wealth, and take away your freedom.
These are not the same level of risk. Yet more hysterical attention is paid to the former instead of the latter.
I keep trying to explain to people that any data companies harvest, for whatever purpose, can then be accessed by the government, and that trying to draw distinctions in what is a big massive ouroboros is irrelevant.
Even if you trust the company AND trust the government, the data exists forever, and no one can trust all future governments and all future corporations.
If the government weren't legally able to use the toilet bowl cleaner companies data against you, it wouldn't matter.
The problem is us giving governments the right to use this data against us (passports to access the internet, messages being under constant surveillance, etc.)
In Europe we're happily handing over our rights every day so that governments have more power over us (supposedly to "protect" us from the big bad evil American tech companies).
Except, Google just wants to make $100/yr off me instead of $50/yr. Meanwhile, the government wants to literally control what I think and feel and do, and take out $100,000 in debt on the back of each of my children's future (we're at 115% debt-to-GDP in France) to fund this nightmare surveillance state.
Look trying to separate them is foolhardy. Corporations exist due the limitation of corporate liability provided by government. There's no scenario where you have a corporation without government. A corporation will sell you out wholesale to continue having the right to make 100 bucks a year off of people.
Plenty of companies collecting data are operated by people who want to control what you think, feel, and do both for profit and based on their owners personal beliefs.
Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.
In general I would agree that say, walmart, is mostly interested in encouraging you to shop at their stores more frequently with the information they gather, it's also true that other corporations are currently selling the information they gather to the government.
And, of course, if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power, in the USA this would include things like state governors / attorneys, federal legislators, presidents, etc, all of whom have some level of influence over my information being collected and used.
If I dislike what walmart is doing, my options are considerably more limited. I can lobby for a law to be passed against it or I can essentially wish for it to go out of business.
How has that been going? Did you manage to elect someone, who made a positive change? Let's be charitable - you can pick an example from your life that goes back up to 50 years.
Is it the best most perfect law ever passed in the history of humanity? Obviously not. Is it substantially better than what came before? YES. It's hard to explain just how screwed you were if you started getting hit by the "pre-existing conditions" disqualifier or your health insurance decided that they only needed to spend a million treating your cancer and after that you're on your own.
No. My point is you should fear centralized power, in exact proportion to the scope of the power being centralized. All power gets abused.
Governments are centralized power on a scale that makes the most powerful corporation on earth look like an ant. Historically AND currently, the worst atrocities come from governments, not companies.
Yet, internet discourse (and new legislation) over the past 10 years has pretended like the biggest threat to us re: data collection is private companies. They are indeed a threat. But they are NOWHERE near the scale of the threat that data collection by governments represents.
This blind spot is part of the reason mass surveillance legislation is being rolled out (largely successfully) everywhere right now.
For example, we've created such a boogieman out of facebook/social media (which, ironically, doesn't even exist anymore as people remember it) that it has manufactured consent among the public for governments building the infrastructure for 1984. A far greater threat to us than micro-targeted face cream ads ever were.
You say that govt is holding a gun to citizen's head, but govt also holding a gun at private company's head.
Both large gov't and large corpo are horrible and both should be equally avoided.
You don't seem able to hold two ideas in your head.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. Yes, governments can abuse their power.
However, the power wielded by governments is on a whole different scale, so the capacity for abuse and atrocity is exponentially larger (governments have killed millions and can literally destroy the entire world with firepower 100X over).
Arguing about who has killed more seems mildly pointless since it relies on a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations. Even aside from stuff like the east indies company, Hearst's newspapers helped create a situation where a war was declared, what share of the resulting death toll do they get?
Beyond that, something I've noticed over my years on this planet is that, generally speaking, power cannot be destroyed, only transferred.
What I mean by that is someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life, in ways that range from what color you can paint your house, where you can buy a house, how much you get paid, whether or not you get paid a salary, how much taxes you pay, etc etc.
I would, in general, prefer that the entity with that power be some kind of democratically elected institution, hopefully with lots of various internal and external safeguards.
As you say, we should be worried about the government collecting and storing our private information. But if we stopped them from doing that, then some other entity would just take over spying on people.
I fully agree with this, but that someone doesn't need to be a 3rd party centralized entity (like a government or company), the power can be decentralized onto you.
That's the story of basically all progress in the modern world.
The evolution from Monarchy/Dictatorship -> Representative Democracy was a step down this path (albeit a mild one).
The evolution of knowledge from Church -> Printing Press -> Internet did this, hence why I have to the power to publicly broadcast these words to you.
The evolution of media from Broadcast TV -> Cable -> Youtube -> Tiktok did this.
The evolution of commerce from Department Stores -> Malls -> Shopify/Etsy/etc did this.
Etc. etc.
Also, I think you're intentionally muddying the waters.
In fact it's extremely easy to make the distinction between "business" and "government," given the monopoly on violence granted to government. Proctor & Gamble has never held a gun to my head and imprisoned me for not buying their products.
False dichotomy, they are the same Lernaean Hydra.
A reminder that governments can buy from private companies. A company like Palantir can buy data from private companies then incorporate it into the software it sells to governments.
And to steal tips [1], lower your salary [2,3], charge you more [3,4], and limit how you may use "your" property [5]. I'm sure there are many I've missed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoorDash#Withholding_of_tips_a... (try doing that when tips are in cash)
[2] https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20260401139/emp...
[3] https://towardsjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Real-S...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/27/nvidia-limits-data-center-us...
Meanwhile governments wield enough power to destroy the entire world 100X over, and are currently shoveling young boys into the meat grinder of war to be slaughtered by the thousands every day.
As a left-leaning forum, HN has a giant blind spot re: government power vs. corporate power. I'm trying to point this out.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. But their power pales in comparison to government power.
Even if true it's almost entirely orthogonal.
The "right" is usually only against government control, intervention and surveillance until they get into power. Then they double down on them. Also right wing parties/groups are generally better at controlling and silencing internal opposition (since they are lot better shutting up and falling in line when push comes to shove regardless of their personal beliefs). So they are usually a lot more effective at imposing these things.
By that logic, you should fear companies at least as much as their governments when handing them your data.
But companies have additional goals: to increase profit. Which can be achieved by selling more toilet bowl cleaner. But also by externalising harm/pollution/costs, monopolising, reducing taxes, etc. All of which harm you, personally.
So, sure, worry about governments. But worry more about (big) companies. Read more history.
This fact alone makes the comparison you’re trying to make pretty silly. You have far, far more to fear from the country from which you’re a citizen than the company for which you’re a customer.
Read more history.
Also, governments consists of a large amount of human each acting for their own benefit. Assuming they can easily collectively united as a single force to use violence to harm all citizen (on the topic of privacy, it really is the case) suddenly is wild.
On the contrary, for a limited government, it very likely will result in using the monopoly of violence to provide extreme capitalism style IP and private property protection which results in dominating power of large companies. On the other hand, every bit of history demonstrated you can never maintain monopoly of violence if you are really against people.
Monopoly on economic is strong because it can be guarded by violence, while violence cannot be easily guarded by itself within a country (unless AI overlord really comes).
Read more history.
With private security companies, private jails, private utilities, the harm both can and will do, is practically the same. And with the boundaries of "private" and "government" becoming more opaque (like private tech companies deciding who is to be detained and who not; who is allowed to access their money; or do their jobs, etc) the difference is even more theoretic.
A government that has absolute power over a company/sector, can (and will, in my belief) use that power to make the company/sector do it's work. Making this company/sector just as dangerous as the company.
If I get mistreated at an airport (of a democratic country), and the agents doing the mistreating are civil-servants, they (or their chain of command) are democratically held accountable. But if they are employees of Acme-Security Inc, granted the right of violence by the democratic government, there's nothing I can do, no-one to appeal to. Both cases are something I, an individual, cannot do anything against. I am mistreated anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre
Read more history.
You fundamentally are unable to judge risk correctly due to your political bias.
You're even admitting the risk of companies harvesting data is that it may fall in the hands of governments.
Yet you still think a private company lobbying to reduce taxes is a greater threat than your government wielding enough firepower to kill millions of people and destroy the entire world.
That's a wild accusation. Unless you happen to know me, but I don't think you do.
"Lobbying to reduce taxes" was a part of an example. The big problem is their "lobbying for greater freedom".
Yes, governments should be held in check. Systems strengthened to keep governments afraid of the people (not companies) they govern. So that they can keep those that are stronger than me and use that strength to harm me, amongst wich are companies, in check. We have most of this in place. It can (and should be) improved. But we have very little in place to keep companies in check. Antitrust cannot (or is not) used against monopolies, (so the common free-market mechanisms of peoples free movement between suppliers aren't working anymore). Laws that protect humans against companies abolished or not modernized. Information (on which agents in the free-market must operate) is less and less trustworthy, mostly a result of companies spreading that (mis)information.
And TBC, companies have harmed people, are doing so as we speak, whole cities, whole countries. They have actively destabilized governments. Not just "somewhere in Africa", but in the US, in Europe. That's an undeniable fact. Many companies will then spend a lot of effort (and money and influence) to be not held accountable (that is harder to prove, obviously). Many companies will wield influence to be allowed to wield firepower, in all it's forms and shapes.
I am from a country with one of the worst examples of such a company in human history, the V.O.C. Who had such power that it had private armies, was accountable to no-one, grew so large that no "official government" could force it to do anything, for over a century. It literally enslaved people, killed inefficient workers, over-exploit and deplete entire ecosystems, etc etc. We should actively and strongly work against such companies from ever coming back (if they ever really left)
Read more history.
Companies can use it to determine voting patters and sell that to interested political parties. Government are made from political parties and can steer money to those parties, thus the data can now be sold indirectly to the government.
Companies can use it to indirectly target competitors through their customers. Creating a monopoly is much more profitable than just selling more products. Gaining favors with political parties in the above strategy can also help here.
Companies can sell data to governments of other countries. Just because your own government has laws that forbids it, it doesn't mean other countries has the same laws or will treat the citizens of your country as their own. Trade like this can also occur in multiple steps. Company sell data to country A, and country A shares/sells it to your own government. Your own government might finds this preferable to buy it directly as laws may not apply to data shared/bought, even if that data is about their own citizens.
Selling personal data to the government is profitable, but there are also other interested parties. People in legal disputes may want information about the other side, or the juries, or even the judge. Companies that want to do industry espionage would want to buy information about other companies employees. Criminal organizations very much like to buy information about vulnerable people like the elderly. Again, the data doesn't need to be sold directly but can go through many hands until it finally reach the most scummy buyers, and the money will slowly trickle upwards to the seller.
As long as someone collects the data and is willing to sell it to someone, sooner or later it will be sold/leaked to someone who shouldn't have it. That is the fundamental issue with companies collecting personal information.
But of course Europe just ignored that warning. Like it anyways has.
1. allow MITM decryption by a privileged authority
2. require all devices doing E2EE have a non-user-modifiable piece of functionality to scan on-device
The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner? I have to say that I do sometimes think about it while taking a photo of my baby playing in the bathtub - photos like my parents have of me which have been kind of nice to see later. It would be a pity if I had to have a separate analog camera just for baby photos because then I'd need to learn the whole developing film stuff.
This is exactly what has been proposed. E.g. WhatsApp has a piece of code that scans images and texts before sending. After that, they are "encrypted".
IIRC weren't there some thoughts that they'd switch iCloud to E2E but add local scanning on upload (compare to what it currently when Apple, Google, etc. freely scan all your cloud photos anyway). That didn't seem like a terrible deal on paper.
Does this mean every parent has to now make sure not to take pictures of their children playing in bath for instance, in order not to trip these scans for false positives?
They CLAIM they scan for CSAM, so watch out your documents and pictures with something that govt also wants to track.
Even with e2ee enabled for iCloud Photos/files (which NOBODY uses, and furthermore is entirely disabled in the UK), it sends identifying hashes of plaintext file content to the server without e2ee.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/07/european-parli...
The party that they want to ban is a consistent and loud opponent of chat control.
It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values. As a justification for blocking democracy it's universal and ever present.
As another example, one of their members (Noah Krieger) fights on behalf of Russia, conquering lands and killing civilians (article from today only in german, sorry: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/videos-mit-schutzweste-u...). And many other problems I could list about AfD. So t he "they want to ban those opposing chat control" - sorry, that is a huge simplification.
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values.
Ah? And why are there only two corrupt parties in the USA to begin with? I mean that's no real choice. Both are corrupt, and one now entered cult-status with the mad orange king. His cronies get rich. Everyone sees this. So, sorry, but your attempt to promote the USA while praising the AfD, is simply flat out rubbish nonsense. We only have bad actors here, no good ones.
I'm inclined to vouch for the comment however I'm not clear if the self admitted AI copy and paste is in keeping with the current HN guidelines.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/19/turmoil-in-ger...
Those aren't citizens though? I don't agree with their ideals but lets please be honest about what they do and don't support.
Read just a little bit more of the article ;)
I was skeptical enough to look over the linked correctiv article and I notice that while those contacted are generally quoted as dodging most of the other questions they invariably come out against expulsion of legal citizens.
> And all those who campaigned for refugees could go there, too.
Are there any credible sources for this independent of the correctiv article? Because this Sellner character is approaching comic book villain level in their portrayal of him and thus I find myself not wanting to take the word of a single outlet.
Just read his Wikipedia article [0] and you'll find out more about his character, like this gem:
> Sellner said that Jews were a problem in the 1920s and made references to the "Jewish question"
> Are there any credible sources for this independent of the correctiv article?
Correctiv is a non-profit investigative journalism outlet that managed to infiltrate this secretive far-right meeting. They are known to be gold-standard levels of credible and have won a ton of journalism prizes. It's not exactly yellow press.
Due to the very nature of it being a secretive meeting, their reporting is exclusive. Obviously the neonazis want to put on a nice face, so they didn't really try to get press involved in their plotting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Sellner
Setting aside the other attendees wikipedia more than covers sellner in that regard.
This explains why they are publicly denying what they are plotting in private.
Here's some choice quotes, translated to English.
"We must proceed completely peacefully and deliberately, adapt if necessary and butter up the opponent [literally: smear honey on their mouths], but when we are finally ready, we will put them all against the wall. (...) Dig a pit, all in and quicklime on top."
-- Holger Arppe, former AfD Vice Chair [0]
"The worse Germany is doing, the better it is for the AfD. [...] Therefore we have to consider a tactic between: How bad can things get for Germany? And: How much can we provoke? [...] Because then the AfD does better. We can always just shoot them all later. That's not an issue at all. Or gas them, or however you want. I don't care!"
-- Christian Lüth, AfD Press spokesman [1]
"It doesn't matter, nothing will change, even if we were to eat chalk [act harmless]. Even if we said: yes, we are separating from X, Y and Z now and acting moderate here."
-- Hans-Christoph Berndt, AfD Brandenburg senate leader [2]
[0] https://taz.de/Frueherer-AfD-Fraktionsvize-verurteilt/!56167... [1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/afd-sprecher-wollte-fluc... [2] https://mik.brandenburg.de/sixcms/media.php/9/Einstufungsver...
Like this is not just me mischaracterizing my political opponents, it is the most accurate label based on their behavior. They're the type of people who want to make the 1930s happen again in Germany.
This is why I react somewhat strongly when people try to relativize their abhorrence and make excuses, most frequently out of incorrectly mapping their own country's political systems.
I hope I could convince you that - especially given Germany's past and its commitment to never let this happen again - banning them is not some sort of political repression, but an immune response from democracy under attack. It is a manifestation of defensive democracy [0] , the principle written into the German constitution after the horrors of fascism.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy#Germany
If you seek to convince people then leading with the sort of examples you linked me is probably the way to go. For those open to new information it cuts to the chase and the rest you weren't going to convince regardless.
The trouble with the german approach that bans political parties is IMO that it creates an easily abused tool that muddies the water. It's no longer so simple to judge a given situation since now you need to consider the content and context of the speech as opposed to merely whether or not it constituted a direct threat of violence.
Meanwhile I don't think it's likely to be effective for the stated purpose. In one scenario the extremists get laughed out of the room as a tiny minority. In another they hold the majority in which case banning them is extremely unlikely to work out favorably. Imagine if Trump who won the popular vote this last time around had been banned by the sitting establishment. There's no way we come out of that unscathed.
Problem is, the German Verfassungsschutz (lit. "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution", the domestic intelligence agency) was itself infiltrated by the far-right [0] and so didn't ring the alarm in time.
I agree with you that there's probably no way to come out unscathed from trying to ban them now - their followers are already radicalized and it probably wouldn't be pretty. But that being said, what else should we do? Just do nothing and let it all happen once more? Break our promise of never again? Watch history repeat itself? No - we have to at least try.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Georg_Maa%C3%9Fen
As a white guy living in the middle east in a country that will never give me their citizenship, I do ask seriously, what's wrong with that? I don't know a single country in Africa, middle east and Asia that gives citizenships to foreigners. Ones that do, do under very very limited circumstances. Why does Europe and north America have to open their doors to everyone?
That's essentially the point you made, while conflating pulling the rug out from under people's feet because they've committed the crime of being brown with never having made the offer in the first place.
Because living in these countries usually comes with significant downsides for minorities. E.g. most middle east countries are limiting freedom for women compared to men.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalization#Summary_by_coun...
How many people of their party must make such statements while being welcome in the party, for it to not be misinformation/misrepresentation.
If the german government and its parties actually listened to people, the AFD would have like 5% and would be non issue. Same with all extremist parties tht try to latch on some idea to get voted in.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/01/11/l...
> It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values
This is a limitation of the American two-party system that incentives polarization instead of cooperation.
We have a working multi-party democracy and a majority across parties and ideologies voted for this.
To think this has anything to do with Chat Control betrays either a deep lack of understanding of European politics or a conscious attempt to mislead in order to garner support for extremists.
* Germany has laws that restricts your freedom of speech. Yes, this is different from the US, because Germany had the Third Reich and Hitler. Hate speech and glorification of Nazis and similar is not allowed.
* Germany has laws that allow banning of parties that are against democratic values. "All people are equal as far as the law is concerned, no matter their skin color, religion or origin" is an important democratic value. Parties who are opposed to these values can be banned.
Now look at the situation in the US. Your "democracy" allowed to brainwash the MAGA voters by enough hate speech so that you now have the new Gestapo (ICE) running rampant, killing people, putting them into concentration camps. Your political caste is corrupt, shuffling money into their own pockets at the expensive of everyone else. You have elected an orange clown who threatens NATO allies with invasion, starts wars that backfire even on the US (not to speak about other countries), who is a child rapist, but apparently above the law.
So before you lecture other people about democratic values, I'd recommend to clean in front of your own door. He who sits in the glasshouse should not throw stones.
This is kinda vague, i.e. afaik German laws discriminate lonely people by taxing them more then married.
But this is the ultimate "grant me dictatorial powers so I can do good" play.
Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law that suddenly touches everyone even though offenders are a small percentage and should be able to be targeted more efficiently.
Back in the day when I was like 15 and DC++ was still a thing, I used to browse people's shared folders. One day I came across a file called "the paradox of false positive". It was a 1 pager that described how a machine which is 99.9% accurate at identifying terrorists would be completely useless due to this false positive base rate fallacy you're describing.
It really stuck with me throughout the years. It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.
Which begs the question: lets assume the intentions are pure (which we know they're not but lets be generous), what other options are there when 99.9% heuristic is not good enough? how do you design systems when they're guaranteed to fail as they scale up?
edit: and what do you know, I just saw this as I scrolled down on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816959
Whereas if only 0.001% of your population are terrorists then 99 out of 100 alerts are false positives at which point the system is well on its way to being useless.
There is an important difference between scenarios where we care about the relative versus absolute frequency of errors.
> There is an important difference between scenarios where we care about the relative versus absolute frequency of errors.
The context is chat control without probable cause over the whole population of Europe with a low prevalence. My point, and presumably that of OP, is that even a small relative frequency of errors will yield an unsustainably high absolute frequncy of errors.
> This is merely information provided to a human agent.
It will be in theory. In practice the human agent will just forward the decision. A human agent is not sufficient; you need to test only with probable cause for the kind of scenario we're talking about. The exact opposite of "Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0".
P.S.: The comment I originally replied to choose a very convoluted way of saying that the false discovery rate of the test matters for a proper evaluation.
> even a small relative frequency of errors will yield an unsustainably high absolute frequncy of errors.
That depends entirely on the rate of true positives in the general population and the rate at which the test successfully catches them. If the success rate is reasonably high and the rate of true positives is within one base ten order of magnitude of the rate of false positives then regardless of volume the stream of reports would be expected to prove quite useful.
To put this in concrete terms, if 1 billion messages are scanned, there are 100 violations, 99 of those violations are successfully detected, and there are an additional 1000 false positives reported, then you've got about a 10% hit rate when examining reports. That would provide a genuinely useful starting point.
But it's not at all clear that we can expect numbers like that. Both because the scanners are likely much worse but also because criminals can't reasonably be expected to stick around on conforming platforms in the event that such measures are enacted.
Even if the reports were 100% accurate I'd still be opposed to it on ideological grounds. I don't think pervasive surveillance of that nature is compatible in the long term with a free and democratic system of government.
> Both you and they explain this by throwing numbers without context in combination with slightly inaccurate definitions.
It was my intent to provide reasoning for all the numbers I put forward. They were meant as examples.
As to definitions I wasn't going by anything formal. I tried to spell out exactly what I meant by each term. Apologies if I wasn't entirely clear about that. Regardless, the precise definitions of the terms aren't what matters here. It's the practical end result - what percentage of the alerts are false?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_negative_predicti...
Suppose I invent a device that can detect whether there is a giant invisible dragon living in your house, and it has an accuracy of 99.999%
Now, I use it in your house and it tells me there is an invisible dragon… so what are the chances that there is a dragon in your house?
Based on your statement, it would be 99.999% likely that there is an invisible dragon in your house. However, we actually know that there is a 0% chance there is an invisible dragon, so even with the positive test result we still know there is a 0% chance a dragon is there.
And there is a saying where I grew up: you need a village to raise a kid, I feel like we lost track of that and feel the issues of that now.
Btw, von der leyen is trying to get stuff like this written down as laws since 2009, it got her the nickname Zensursula.
And it fails miserably.
That's a good way to put it
The all too common trope of “nosy neighbors call CPS because the family next door lets their kids walk to school, whole family traumatized as a result” is the perfect encapsulation of all three factors
I mean, I'll gladly send you 10k years back and have you tell me how it goes.
Needlessly reductionist doomerist take with no argumentation to back that up.
Yes it does. If you're of the mindset that drives one to build a nanny state that is. My assumption is the mindset is that any amount of CSA is completely intolerable and that we must try to reach zero cases and there can be no other goal. If that's the framing then parenting alone fails miserably at it.
I think that's a terrible goal, because it leads to the nanny state.
Or is that where you want other people to end up while you peddle propagandist fairytales about failed parenting?
Of course I'm on your side here, there should be a healthy balance, which modern child micromanagement, and zealous survellance in general, are quite an opposite of. Saying this as someone who survived my happy 80-90-s childhood, roaming freely wherever we wanted with my friends, doing kid things many modern parents would be terrified of, like climbing various industrial structures, crashing on our bikes and sleds and whatnot. And still being a good homeboy in the eyes of my parents and neghbours.
One can't turn the world into a perfectly safe utopia without turning it into complete dystopia in the process. Education and culture is what makes it safe without such side effects.
And Germans and Europeans looked at that and thought the best place for her is leading the EU?!
Remind me again how she got elected in that position?
I am not against EU cooperation, mainly in external security and free market economy. But the system we have is not very democratic, and def not very representative of people. They act like demigods, elected by parliament with no real consequences of their actions.
I disagree. That's an executive power position for an entity that lacks sovereignty. Giving it the legitimacy of direct vote is highly problematic.
Start by giving more power to parliament.
Also most of the EU population don’t know her for anything at all. I’d be surprised if more than 50% of Europeans could name her.
If the 99.9% accuracy means the volume that requires manual or additional review is reduced by a factor of 1000, that’s a win.
Of course if a false positive means ruining someone’s life as in this case, it’s generally more a problem of how the classifier results are handled than anything else.
And often, it’s false negative rate that is the real problem. You can often build a 99.9% classifier by simply returning False, which is obviously useless (or equivalent to not testing and assuming some miss rate). If you’re dealing with consequential “failures” (of whatever kind) the most important thing is usually not missing any.
Again, none of that really applies here because the whole premise is stupid.
[1]: https://www.covid2020.icu/false-positive-false-negative-simu...
No. If the scanner is 99.99% accurate, then most matches will be correct.
So a quota of 0.1% or even less material being detectably criminal sounds realistic (probably not much less, though).
Relevant XKCD: 882
https://www.koffellaw.com/blog/google-ai-technology-flags-da...
The corporate liability of such content being found on their cloud is so insanely nuclear, that they're not gonna wait and ask you "hey are those nudes your own kids or are you a pedo?"
Reminder that none of this has any evidence that it helps CSA, but nobody cares about the actual children.
They should give precise numbers of how many such crimes are detected via such means or are expected to be detected per year, and how many of those are not possible to catch through regular investigative work. It just seems ridiculously out of proportion especially that with all this flurry around the topic, the criminals surely aren't using WhatsApp for this any more, but especially won't be once the law is adopted. Sure, many are likely stupid but if they are so stupid, won't they fall into other honeypots?
Why are chat apps the best leverage for uncovering this? They'd have to justify this with some sort of data and numbers.
Because later they can just come back and say, well unfortunately they are now all using other means, so now we need to break https,we need to ban e2e, we need to ban vpns, tor and foss operating systems etc etc.
Anyways, once that implemented noone will report to you and there will be no means of pushing against it because all your online efforts to coordinate will be compromised.
> suddenly touches everyone
..............I see what you did there.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
H.L. Mencken
> The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
> For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
> Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
This is like trying to prevent burglary by working with the factory that manufactures pry bars.
By the parents. Install parental controls that only allow to message you and closest relatives. Problem solved.
Because narrow law is easier to avoid or find the loophole and a single case is enough to induce panic and anger.
https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chat-control-the-415-who...
I will investigate.
The irony is, you don't actually need Tor on my site because there is no logging, no third parties, no adtech etc. it is just static HTML files - so whereas I would normally recommend Tor I designed the site specifically to be privacy first.
I will try to figure out what is going on though because obviously I am fully supportive of people protecting their privacy with Tor.
Nothing to do with the certs just told me a cert error because it never finished the handshake.
I tested through Tor on multiple machines now and multiple circuits and is working clean - thanks for the heads up.
outlier cases aside, there is also just a large amount of processing power that will go into this, the service can only be worse off for it. Privacy is not just about being able to hide things, it is also about being in control of how you present to the world. not because that control is maniupulative but because we all exist within our own microcosms of uniqueness, using words slightly differently than each other, and having certain balances of intention and meaning with those we send messages to that cannot be fully presumed from a 3rd party. even in images.
Are they really saying "if you want to send private messages then go make your own network" ?
I think there is no way to fix this system from the inside - it is designed to be abused like that. We need an alternative system.
It’s not about catching hackers or child predators, it’s about government control.
https://aboutsignal.com/news/the-end-of-private-conversation...
My answer: regulating something:)
The Commission is an expression of _governments_ (and this one in particular is the result of painstaking compromise) and is only loyal to presidents and prime ministers. It has no accountability to the EP, and it shows.
Or they scan at the edge on the user's device.
Either way, both are very prone to false positives and and very much privacy invading.
So then the user can "just" install their own client.
Scan on end user's devices, but never transmit the result of that. Only report it ON the device itself to the user. A false positive when you send a pic of your naked kid to your spouse might show a warning icon asking you if you are sure you want to send it.
Also: for minors (Who is a minor not determined by some central age verification, but by me specifying in the Apple/Android family settings who my kids are) you could make sending certain things it blocking or subject to parent approval. E.g. if my daughter is tricked into sending nudes, it's something that's handled the same as if she wants to install an app or visit a specific web page.
No encryption is ever backdoored. Anything beyond this, e.g. reporting any user actions, would be allowed only through a court, just like any wiretapping always was.
Voluntary for whom? The service provider? Can I opt out of getting scanned?
> Does it touch encrypted messages? - No. End-to-end encrypted communications were never scanned but providers could deploy client-side scanning under this law.
So it circumvents e2e encryption?
---
How would these laws prevent me from just side loading my own open source client?
They do not.
Non of these laws stop you from opting out of surveillance, but altogether it gets so hard that at some point you get more suspicious and tracked if you do all this than if you don't do any of these.