[soco]

I must notice that every time, but really every time, EU moves a pinky finger against tech industry, a sizeable chunk of comments here will be like the one above. I wonder, is it about a general sentiment against EU? Or a general sentiment against restricting technology? Or a general sentiment against humans? Or what?

[palata]

I think it's easier and safer to complain about everything than to actually have a nuanced and informed stance.

Look at age verification: it's very easy and very safe to say "nobody sane would think that it is a good idea to force people to show their ID to every website they want to access, it will obviously leak the IDs, that is very bad!". While it is not wrong, it is manipulative: that is not the only way to implement age verification. In fact, there is technology that exists that would allow age verification in a privacy-preserving manner: some service that already have access to your ID can give you a token that proves your age, and you can then use this token to access a website. The service cannot know where you use the token, the website cannot know your ID, and they cannot collude.

So the constructive debate around age verification is this: assuming we implement it properly (i.e. in a privacy-preserving manner), is that something that we want or not? Does it solve a problem, or at least does it help?

But we cannot ever elevate the debate to that level, because nobody can't be arsed to get informed about it.

[soco]

But ironically exactly the people in the better place to influence that half-arsed implementation are those who comment here - instead of influencing said implementation. Somehow what we do ourselves at work is always good and nice and perfect (while what others do is brain-dead and pointless). Now okay you could say an engineer is too small to change politics, but how about 100 engineers? Thousands? If the whole practice would say loud "whoa this doesn't fly" I bet the decision makers would listen. But no, most of the techies will say "okay whatever let's do it" then (maybe) come online to complain.

[palata]

The thing, I believe, is that engineers are just people. They also have strong, uninformed opinions. It's not like every engineer is an expert in cryptography, right?

For instance, there is a large consensus against ChatControl, agreeing on the fact that it's impossible to let the good guys decrypt arbitrary data without opening it to the bad guys. As a result, I don't think it's still a debate: the EU won't ask to weaken the encryption. Now an alternative to that is stuff like scanning the messages on the device (which technically does not break the encryption) and report them when it makes sense. There is a problem with that, too: in order to detect "illegal" content, someone has to decide what is illegal. And because it evolves, probably it's a list that can be updated remotely. And whoever controls that list has some surveillance power we may not want to give anyone (I know I don't).

It seems to me that this second issue took more time to get traction, but now engineers generally understand it. So if a politician asks, they can say "you can technically do that, but you are building a dangerous surveillance apparatus". It doesn't mean that the politicians won't want it, but at least they should understand the technical stance on it.

So for ChatControl, engineers seem to understand the problem, and the consequence of that is that ChatControl hasn't passed. At least not yet, and now I think those in favour have to convince enough people that building those surveillance tools is a good idea.

For age verification it's a lot different, IMO. There is a website dedicated to it: https://ageverification.dev/, explaining how they want it to be privacy preserving, which is technically possible. But still, there doesn't seem to be a large consensus about this (see the comments on HN). Many, many engineers keep saying "it is not technically possible", which is wrong. Maybe it is not desirable, which is a different debate. But it is technically possible.

What does that mean? Well for age verification, from what I see the "engineers community" is not credible at all. I can't get anything from it "as a community" other than "people yell many things, many of them being factually wrong". Many will say "not only it's not technically possible, but ON TOP OF THAT it is not desirable", but why would I listen to their second point when I can verify that the first one is already wrong?

It's always the same problem: not every opinion is worth the same. The opinion of an expert is worth more in their domain of expertise. So you can't just run a poll on HN and go with its result, right? In the case of age verification, for instance, it seems like the EU has been talking to actual experts, because https://ageverification.dev/ seems pretty good.

I feel like many engineers yell against it because they don't like the idea of age verification, not because it's technically bad. Which is a fair stance to have. But the honest way to defend it is by actually talking about why they think privacy-preserving age verification is a bad thing. Claiming that it is not technically possible is either uninformed (and therefore not credible) or manipulative, IMHO.

[ToucanLoucan]

Boiling kid's (and adult's) brains probably makes them a decent chunk of money, either directly via salary or indirectly via stocks. Ensuring kids remain healthy makes no money. An unfortunately large slice of the tech sector doesn't give the tiniest shit about the health of our broader society or any group in it if it means their lines stop going up, or even go up slightly less fast.

[watwut]

Imo, both. The more right wing people started to have aggressively anti-EU stance once Vance openly stood on the side of Orban and against EU and democracies in general.

And some people see tech companies as worship worthy and trying to restrict them is kind of a blasphemy.

[modo_mario]

The Vance thing is far too recent and inconsequential across europe?

The sentiment precedes all that and mostly stems from the EU being in some ways originally lib left dominated and still being seen as facilitating non-eu migration

Regular right wing people (aka not one of the many parties potentially receiving donations) don't tend to love giant webtech companies. Especially since they feel like they're often used as a tool against them and aren't a local thing that draws nationalists either.

A focus on privacy also isn't a very left-right defined thing tho i have noticed that the most far reaching expressions of it come a bit more from the further ends of that spectrum. (you'll see some very left leaning people at fosdems privacy focused/related stands for example)

[dgellow]

> don't tend to love giant webtech companie

That’s a bit outdated since musk bought twitter