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Comment by riedel

2 days ago

They oppose breaking encryption, however, I see no true opposition to on device scanning, which is a bit worrying.

>The BMI representative explained that they could not fully support the Danish position. They were, for example, opposed to breaking the encryption. The goal was to develop a unified compromise proposal – also to prevent the interim regulation from expiring. [0]

Edit: source [0] https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356

There is no on-device scanning without compromising privacy. Scanning that can detect child abuse can also detect human rights activists, investigative journalists, and so on. I imagine this technology can be easily used by the government to identify journalists by scanning for material related to their investigation.

On-device scanning is a fabrication that Apple foolishly introduced to the mainstream, and one that rabid politicians bit into and refuse to let go.

  • Some say "Apple got too much shit for on device scanning". I think they didn't get nearly enough.

    If you as much as give the "think of the children" crowd an inch, they'll take a mile. And giving them on device scanning was way more than "an inch".

    • Apple has never supported your privacy though, not really. Spyware company issues spyware, news at 11. They're better than Google, but they're not good.

  • That is exactly the problem. I still can imagine that they come up with some scheme as a compromise, that particularly targets particularly encrypted group chats along with all kind of server side automatic scanning, that as you mention could be abused at least by intelligence to track non CSAM content. I wonder what other 'compromise' will actually be effectively possible.

"Es sei klar, dass privater, vertraulicher Austausch auch weiterhin privat sein müsse."

"Private communication needs to stay private"

I interprete this as not having a dumb police bot installed on my devices checking all my communication. That sometimes by misstake sends very private pictures away, because it missclassified.

This is what chat control means and I believe if most people would understand it, they would not be in support of it. It is no coincidence, that the outcry mainly happens in tech affine groups.

  • I bet what the politicians mean is "we have to make sure our surveillance is safe, like our digital health data, so that no bad actors can tap it". The only one who should be reading your messages is you, the sender, and the government.