Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Chat Control 2.0: EU governments set to approve the end of private messaging and secure encryption (www.patrick-breyer.de)

submitted 1 year ago by makeasnek@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

124 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/6469594

How to contact your MEP.

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[–] rrobin@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a really nice summary of the practical issues surrounding this.

There is one more that I would like to call out: how does this client scanning code end up running in your phone? i.e. who pushes it there and keeps it up to date (and by consequence the database).

I can think of a few options:

The messaging app owner includes this as part of their code, and for every msg/image/etc checks before send (/receive?)
The phone OS vendor puts it there, bakes it as part of the image store/retrieval API - in a sense it works more on your gallery than your messaging app
The phone vendor puts it there, just like they already do for their branded apps.
Your mobile operator puts it there, just like they already do for their stuff

Each of these has its own problems/challenges. How to compel them to insert this (ahem "backdoor"), and the different risks with each of them.

[–] yiliu@informis.land 21 points 1 year ago

Another problem: legislation like this cements the status quo. It's easy enough for large incumbents to add features like this, but to a handful of programmers trying to launch an app from their garage, this adds another hurdle into the process. Remember: Signal and Telegram are only about a decade old, we've seen new (and better) apps launch recently. Is that going to stop?

It's easy to say "this is just a simple hash lookup, it's not that big a deal!", but (1) it opens the door to client-side requirements in legislation, it's unlikely to stop here, (2) if other countries follow suit, devs will need to implement a bunch of geo-dependant (?) lookups, and (3) someone is going to have to monitor compliance, and make sure images are actually being verified--which also opens small companies up to difficult legal actions. How do you prove your client is complying? How can you monitor to make sure it's working without violating user privacy?

Also: doesn't this close the door on open software? How can you allow users to install open source message apps, or (if the lookup is OS-level) Linux or a free version of Android that they're able to build themselves? If they can, what's to stop pedophiles from just doing that--and disabling the checks?

If you don't ban user-modifiable software on phones, you've just added an extra hurdle for creeps: they just need to install a new version. If you do, you've handed total control of phones to corporations, and especially big established corporations.