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by 127 729 days ago
I'm going to be the controversial one here and just claim that more harm is currently done by unrestricted social media than any privacy invasions. Predators have free reign to do whatever they wish anonymously and get away with it.

I don't want a dystopian big brother watching over my back, but that's where we are going if somebody doesn't come up with alternatives to control the abuse.

I would personally vote for government issued public/private key cryptography. Sign with your key to verify that you are a citizen of such and such state, gaining a trusted unique identifier without subjecting yourself to a privacy invasion outside a court order. Or a similar system. I'm not an expert on the matter.

Free spaces are still allowed, but as you don't have an pseudonymous identifier, nobody will trust you and should not. Also legislation around this should be built.

2 comments

This sounds like the privilege of never having been persecuted by your own government. And the lack of empathy towards and acknowledgment of those who are.
True. But I have been subjected to a massive amount of hybrid war and influence operations by other adversarial entities. Persecution is bad. So is degrading democracy and turning people against each other.
thing is, this chat control will not help. Criminals will use illegal tools while all the rest of the population will be subject to gov investigation (including monitoring political adversaries). And that's one thing - if the system is wrongly implemented, this backdoor could be accessed by 3'rd parties/hackers and at that point it would be a clown show. Unrestricted social media is another problem that should be solved, it'll not be solved by this law, in fact it may worsen it if certain actors will want to alter backdoor mechanism so that the access to all the data will not be shared only with govt
It will help. Just as any system that has trade-offs. So much of human existence would be much simpler and happier if we didn't have to build systems to control crime and bad behavior.

Is it a system I want? No. I think there are better options. Do I see people in this thread proposing any better options? No. So the default seems to be Orwellian as everyone is too dismissive, arrogant and lazy.

> everyone is too dismissive

I am, indeed dismissive. I don't believe any crime justifies mass surveillance. Client-side scanning in all public chat apps cannot be described any other way. I am therefore opposed to it without any room for subtlety.

That does not mean I don't care about child abuse. If someone wants to propose more funding for law enforcement to investigate crimes against children and additional resources to support victims, I'm all for it.

better option is to leave privacy as is. You basically trade a dream of catching criminals (that will switch to illegal tools to keep their data hidden) to a reality where govts,hackers and big corpos can get your data much easier and use it against you. If you think there are better options, the solution is to cancel this privacy invading law and start discussing abt those better solutions instead of implementing a law that will hurt ppl by design by offering much more power to govs, corporations and much bigger surface attack for hackers