Terrorists will have no problem writing their own encryption program, and more ordinary citizens will install malicious apps from unofficial app stores.
Ah… terrorist, the magic word. That’s why you can’t have a SIM card which is not tied to your ID or passport in EU since 2015. Terrorists actions allowing an state entity throwing 4000t of explosive on civils in a weekend… yep yep…
more seriously (though I wasn’t totally kidding), your non-tech relatives and friends are all on whatsapp/insta/messenger, good luck to move them.
People in Reddit and sometimes here always praise the EU as some bastion of privacy, and I always got downvoted when I said that this isn’t always true. And now here we are. I hope people don’t forget this after a month, like they always do.
They will, and you’re screaming into the wind sadly.
What you can do is never forget and base your voting decisions to include this as a priority going forward. Endorse and support companies that protect privacy.
It’s a long uphill battle and every little thing can help no matter how small.
What is wrong with the eu? Why do they need to always ban end to end encryption?
Lobbyists.
Lobbiests are probably the one reason they haven’t passed such anti-privacy laws, actually.
There’s lobbying on both sides
As I remember at the moment partly Von Der Leyen, the current Commission president. She is a German Christian democrat and apparently bit with capital C. Meaning she has bit of a moral panic streak on her of the “won’t you think of the children” variety. As I understand this current proposal is very much driven by her.
However her driving it doesn’t mean it sail through to pass as legislation. Some whole memberstate governments are against the encryption busting idea.
And the fact that Ylva Johansson, being technologically illiterate as well as a close bed buddy with companies in the surveillance industry that stand to earn a crap load of money doesn’t help…
Von Der Leyen is a swinger clubber
I’m sure they will tell you it’s weighing the security (against terrorists, criminals, etc) of the many against the security (from seeing dick pics or messaging a mistress) of the few.
The thing that always kills me about that phrase is “the needs of the many” are “the needs of the few,” because “the many” is just a gaggle of “fews.”
And the EU is wondering why they’re having an image problem
Let’s wait after Polish and German elections. People are fed up with this.
Making it illegal only hampers those that follow the law.
Criminals, by definition, already don’t follow the law.
Exactly. When privacy is criminal, only criminals will have privacy.
Thing is, there are a load of people who don’t have the know how, time and/or care to use an alternative. That goes for scum bags sharing child porn, terrorists teaching how to make an easy pipe bomb, journalists reporting on local corruption, people sending flirty sexts to their spouses, activists trying to get a movement going, anti-vax groups, people trying to source dubiously legal and/or ethical drugs/medicines… and so on.
Banning it in mainstream apps and legal stores makes it harder - and harder to know if you can trust an app (is this niche one I found through pirates-r-us forum really trustworthy) - and easier to spot and target those who use illegal/minority options.
So I think you would catch and block a load of CSAM, even though obviously not all.
While this would be terrible if it passes, a part of me hopes a silver lining would be a massive surge in open source development focusing on privacy respecting software that does not follow or enable this disgusting behavior by the eu
What fucking fascists.
deleted by creator
Fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarian dystopian thinking, it’s all the same to me when it comes to the State overstepping and blatantly looking to pass laws that remove the right to privacy and autonomy from citizens. I’m no leftist ideologue, I skew libertarian right (although I couldn’t describe all the nuance of my views within the context of a simple label), but if there’s one thing we have in common, it’s our hatred of government overreach and corporate control of the masses.
Fuck authoritarianism. Fuck collectivist bullshit. Never stand for the trampling of your rights.
Just imagine the headline we’d see in the west if this was happening in China.
If apps would turn off e2e encryption, how would it be? Would it affect bordering regions? Users of VPNs inside EU?
My country proposed a ban on VPN software (targeting appstores providibg them), it can also target messengers. If I get a EU version of this app, or if I use a european VPN to connect via it, would I be less safe sending political memes?
I wonder if openPGP will ever gain popularity.
The only ones I have seen that even publish a key for me to use are a few famous internet individuals (people like Richard stallman, (I don’t know if he specifically uses it)), a few companies like mullvad, a few orgs like EFF, whistleblowers, and a few governmental organisations like the Financial Supervisory Authority in my country.
@lud @makeasnek With more government controls and intervention, its possible. I learned how to use PGP pretty efficiently but there is absolutely no one in my daily life that also uses it.
Manual encryption with personal keys may become the norm if less and less services are able to use it.
I wonder if projects like Signal could make a community run and certified hash database that could be included in Signal et al without threat of governments and self-interested actors putting malicious entries in. It definitely doesn’t solve every problem with the client side scanning, but it does solve some.
But… an open, verifiable database of CSAM hashes has its own serious problems :-S Maybe an open, audited AI tool that in turn makes the database? Perhaps there’s some clever trick to make it verifiable that all the hashes are for CSAM without requiring extra people to audit the CSAM itself.
You’re unfortunately also handing people distributing csam a way to verify whether their content would be detected by checking it against the database
Yes, though doesn’t client side scanning do that anyway? Or must the client side scan be completely secret and also only communicate to law enforcement/whatever secretly?
@makeasnek
Imagine a data leak in such a situation.Although some US corporations such as Meta are already scanning European messages for previously classified CSAM ‚only‘
This is news to me, does anyone have any more detail?
If they can scan it, they can edit it.
Would a way to legally bypass this be an app that can “encrypt” your text before your send it. The government would be able to see all of your messages but it would be scrambled in a way that they couldn’t read it.
Something where both people would install the same text scrambling app and generate the same key to scramble all text (would need to do in person). They would then type all their text into the app and it would scramble it. The user would then copy The Scrambled text and send it over any messaging platform they want. The recipient would need to copy the text and put it back into the scrambling app to descramble it.
This is how PGP works and is pretty widely used. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
