Comment by Gormo
2 days ago
> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.
That's the same 99% of the population whose motivations and priorities define the incentive structures applicable to politics. If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight without quite a lot of leverage attached to entirely unrelated issues.
So the choice is between creating impediments to the enforcement of this bad policy, and at minimum using technology to establish a frontier beyond which it can't reach -- one that is at least available to those motivated to seek it out -- or instead surrendering completely to politics controlling everything, with it being almost a certainty that the political process will be dominated by adverse interests.
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight
Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
We will need technical solutions to Chat Control of course, but that's just the last step. First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. An uncensored chat app is useless if we can't install it on our devices without government approval.
Unfortunately a significant portion of the tech community is in favor of these walled ~~prisons~~ gardens. Anything we try to do is doomed to fail without freedom to do what we want with devices we own, so until we get past that hurdle I'm hopeless that we'll be able to do anything about Chat Control.
> Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
I'm not very hopeful about politics generally, for that very reason. The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.
> First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement.
Another political solution? Not going to happen. We need to work towards a functional mobile OS ecosystem that isn't controlled by Apple, Google, or the government. That won't be easy, and won't offer any immediate short-term options, but work is already in progress, and will in the long run be far more effective than waiting for politics to save us.
> Another political solution? Not going to happen.
I hold out some hope that the EU "faction" responsible for the DMA makes enough progress in the coming years to make the lives of Chat Control proponents difficult by fighting for viability and complete independence of third party app stores. That's why I think it's critical for the EU to strike down Apple's (and now Google's) notarization process.
I'd also invite those who support walled gardens and attack the EU for the DMA to rethink their position because if authoritarian legislation like Chat Control succeeds in the EU, it's definitely coming to the US next.
Of course an independent OS would be the dream but I'm even less hopeful about that.
> The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.
This statement is meaningless. You can’t finance, develop, build, sell, and operate an OS and phone in a vacuum outside the reach of “politics”.
Nobody has the resources like an Apple or a Google to develop an open mobile OS that will be able to run on any hardware
2 replies →
> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue...
That depends largely on how the issue is presented. For example, it is now seen as "only sensible" to use pseudonyms online to protect your true identity from random people.
Why does the same not apply to your other data?
Why should the government have access to pictures of your children?
Which is all well and good, and to the extent that people are won over to those arguments and create more political capital for putting an end to these privacy-violating policies, all for the better.
But that's not a substitute for nor mutually exclusive with technical measures to protect privacy, which will work regardless of the political milieu.