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Scanning "private" content

Scanning "private" content

Posted Aug 11, 2021 21:28 UTC (Wed) by philipstorry (subscriber, #45926)
Parent article: Scanning "private" content

I get the feeling that we're going to discover a whole heap of edge cases from this.

For example, most sexual predators are part of the community or even extended family. What if they're adding photos from social media to their photo sets? Suddenly someone sends an old picture of their kid at the beach to someone, and BANG! Hash match, and you've got a problem. In some justice systems this will be handled well, in others it will be handled terribly.

Can you imagine people being told "We know you're abusing that child, Apple tells us so. Take this guilty plea and it'll be easier for you." Because I really wouldn't bet against that happening.

This has the potential to ruin lives in new and awful ways.


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Scanning "private" content

Posted Aug 12, 2021 9:08 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (9 responses)

The less democratic a state, the less it cares about side effects and treating everyone fairly.

An authoritarian state will much prefer the ability to repress hard a minority of opponents, over the ability to detect and police what it considers petty crimes. And, in fact, being able to repress at will relies on the existence of a large amount of unprosecuted offenses (real or false positives). This way you have ready-to-be-opened cases against a large part of the population.

So, depending on your objectives, lack of fairness and huge amount of false positives are not a bug but a feature.

Finally the nice thing about algorithms is that they do not have a conscience and won’t protest overreaching. You only need to care about the subset of people involved into prosecutions. With traditional manual data collection any of the army or data collecting bureaucrats can turn whistleblower.

Scanning "private" content

Posted Aug 12, 2021 13:30 UTC (Thu) by ldearquer (guest, #137451) [Link] (8 responses)

>> The less democratic a state, the less it cares about side effects and treating everyone fairly.

Similar phrasing could be utilized for a careless state, which applies populistic measures, being welcome by a majority, regardless of the harm caused to smaller groups, or groups without direct democratic representation (as children are).

No one asked children if they were ok with all the technology changes of the last decades, considering they could arguably make them more vulnerable.

Privacy is a good thing, but it is not the absolute most important asset of humanity. Maybe it is in the top 10, but not in the top 5.

I would give away my online privacy any day *if* that would reduce children abuse.

Note this is a generic take on the problem, not a defense of this specific way of doing things.

Scanning "private" content

Posted Aug 12, 2021 14:35 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (7 responses)

But can a careless state be considered democratic ? The sole advantage of democraties over other regimes is that they are supposed to care about everyone equally (one head = one vote).

It seems to me that assigning unequal political weights to citizens (caring less about some than others, breaking the one head = one vote rule) is a fast path to something else.

Scanning "private" content

Posted Aug 12, 2021 17:18 UTC (Thu) by ldearquer (guest, #137451) [Link] (6 responses)

I hate to disagree with such a naive vision of democracy.

A state is democratic as long as the government is elected by the people or their representatives. That's it. Greeks already realized long ago how things could still go wrong.

Also note how the one head=one vote still excludes children. Not that it is easy to get around (direct children votes could be a disaster), but IMO this has an effect on politics.

Democracy

Posted Aug 12, 2021 19:33 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (5 responses)

There's a long history of expanding the franchise with people incorrectly predicting drastic consequences if this is attempted and then nothing interesting happening.

Just 200 years ago, England and Wales had a completely baroque electoral system, where in one place the Member might be elected by more or less anybody who had an opinion (conventionally not by women but it wasn't technically illegal, records do not indicate any women _trying_ to vote under this system) and in others only by members of a group actually _paid_ by the current Member (which is scarcely any sort of democracy at all), each district could have its own rules and most of them did.

Great Reform shook that up, introducing a baseline that would allow a typical middle aged skilled worker or professional of the era to meet requirements to register as a voter -- but it didn't result in a great upheaval, and over the rest of that century if anything the aristocracy actually expanded their control, because it turns out rich merchants can buy 100 votes in a district where only 150 people can vote anyway, but greatly expanding the franchise makes this game unaffordable for them - whereas if people vote for you, Sir Whatever just because they always voted for you, or your father (also Sir Whatever) before you, that's not difficult to maintain when more of them qualify to vote.

100 years ago, a lot of women could vote, though far more men (all men over 21), the introduction of widespread voting by women was seen as potentially very disruptive. In fact, the women proved no more spirited than the men, and more or less the same people (overwhelmingly men) were elected. Even when women were given the exact same rights (all women over 21 too) it made no major difference.

In the middle of the 20th century the UK got around to abolishing plural voting (yes, right up until 1948 "one man, one vote" literally wasn't the rule although plural voting had been somewhat neutered after Great Reform) and only in 1969 did they lower the age to 18. The newly enfranchised teenagers did not in fact tear down grown-up government, and things still continued more or less as before.

Among obvious groups that still ought to be enfranchised: Convicted criminals from prison -- at least all those convicted of crimes unrelated to the functioning of democracy, and frankly probably those too unless you're bad at prisons and can't keep them from tampering with the vote from inside a prison; Children -- certainly all teenagers and there's no particular reason not to enfranchise any child that seems to actually have a preference, their preferences certainly can't be less _informed_ than those of adult voters so why not?

Overall, given that the only function of democracy is to avoid the alternative (violent transitions of power) why shouldn't we let toddlers help if they want to?

Democracy

Posted Aug 13, 2021 22:25 UTC (Fri) by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039) [Link] (2 responses)

> Among obvious groups that still ought to be enfranchised: Convicted criminals from prison -- at least all those convicted of crimes unrelated to the functioning of democracy, and frankly probably those too unless you're bad at prisons and can't keep them from tampering with the vote from inside a prison

Here in Canada this is happily already the case after the Supreme Court deemed the restrictions of the time unjustified (though not unjustifiable: the government simply failed to make their case).

> Children -- certainly all teenagers and there's no particular reason not to enfranchise any child that seems to actually have a preference, their preferences certainly can't be less _informed_ than those of adult voters so why not?

Ensuring that a toddler can vote secretly, in safety, and free from coercion by their guardians all at the same time would probably be a challenge, but I agree 18 years is definitely not a magically appropriate age.

Democracy

Posted Aug 14, 2021 15:14 UTC (Sat) by BirAdam (guest, #132170) [Link] (1 responses)

I could easily be convinced that 18 is too young for a person to be trusted to vote. I could equally easily be convinced that 14 is old enough. This depends entirely upon the person in question and his/her relative life experience, intelligence, and sense of caution. When rules are made for a large society, any type of individual consideration is removed due to expediency.

Democracy is not good in itself. Many dictators and horrible people have been elected to office. In the current USA, citizens are no longer guaranteed trial by jury, or even their right to life. Selling lose cigarettes? Death penalty. Your father was a US citizen but also Muslim? Death penalty (Abdul Rahman and Nawar al-Awlaki).

Part of my dislike for Apple’s move here is based upon these exact considerations. Even in supposedly free countries, freedoms are frequently done away with in the interest of stopping something horrible. Today, this is child exploitation which is far from well defined. Tomorrow, it will be the even more weakly defined “terrorism,” where terrorist is truly just whomever the state deems bad.

Democracy

Posted Aug 14, 2021 16:58 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

> In the current USA, citizens are no longer guaranteed trial by jury, or even their right to life.

This phrasing suggests the existence of some prior state of the union in which they were.

And, well.

Neither the Federal government nor any state in the union has ever seriously considered forbidding the use of lethal weapons by law enforcement officers.

Democracy

Posted Aug 16, 2021 11:09 UTC (Mon) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

> There's a long history of expanding the franchise with people incorrectly predicting drastic consequences if this is attempted and then nothing interesting happening.

Indeed, there is a long history of *people doing anything at all* with people incorrectly predicting drastic consequences if this is attempted and then nothing interesting happening.

It is entirely *possible* that Apple stops at child porn, and only ever detects child porn, and the hashes are good enough that false positives are rare and random.

Democracy

Posted Aug 16, 2021 12:33 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Possible, yes. Highly unlikely, also yes.


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