Comment by b112
1 month ago
"The state has no business listening in on private citizen's communication."
The absolutely do, depending on circumstances.
So primary is this concept of privacy, that it requires an entire legal framework, evidence of potential wrongdoing, proof that there is no other method to achieve the goal of validating guilt, proof that the crime is severe, and not a hunting expedition, approval via a warrant after a judge has examined that evidence, and strict controls around the entire usage of that warrant.
Wikipedia says:
Lawful interception is officially strictly controlled in many countries to safeguard privacy; this is the case in all liberal democracies.
Using this edge case as "depending on circumstances" is clearly not the generic I was referencing. The statement that
"The state has no business listening in on private citizen's communication."
Is valid, correct, accurate. Listing edge cases, is not invaliding the rule. It is the exception to the rule, and considering the sheer volume of communication, compared to the volume actively tapped in a legal means, it is the most edge case of edge cases.
There is no reason I would deem a mega-corp to somehow be OK to do what I would demand the state not. That our democratic societies have deemed that our states should not.
To highlight that, the phone companies of old would be in infinitely hot water, should they listen to communication between customers, in any fashion.
A platform is not a parent, should not police, should not act as an arm of the state, or as an arm of parents, except as I stipulated, by direct request of the parents, and only to enable the parents to be a guardian. Under no circumstances should that involve the platform scanning anything, instead, the platform could simply give parents direct access to a child's account.
" that it requires an entire legal framework, evidence of potential wrongdoing, proof that there is no other method to achieve the goal of validating guilt"
No it doesn't.
Life is no Reddit, lawyers and technicalities.
It's made up of regular people in communities.
If you see some guy creeping on 10 year-olds, you can notify the police and Facebook will do that as well - for the same reason.
It may not at all need to involve 'state surveillance', and Meta can probably hand over whatever they want to the police in that circumstance.
The police can make a decision as to how to proceed.
A bit like if someone was harassing someone on the street.
Or if an unknown person starts hanging out outside by a schoolyard in a way that seems inappropriate.
We don't want to transgress people's rights but we also are going to look at 'negative signals'.
You've quoted out of context, eliminating:
"The state has no business listening in on private citizen's communication."
So yes, the concept of privacy is so primary that the it requires an entire legal framework for the state to listen in.
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In terms of the rest of your post, even though you quoted out of context, what you're saying is fine. But the people noticing things on the street, have nothing to do with those who maintain the roads. You really don't want corporations to have algorithms which mean they have to report trigger words to the police or state.
Instead, as I said, empower the parents. Legal guardians. It's their job to watch.
" You really don't want corporations to have algorithms which mean they have to report trigger words to the police or state"
They already do.
The entire financial system, all of social media, and many organizations past a certain size.
I did not quote out of context - the commenter was missattributing context.
2 replies →
With e2e encryption, the signals you have are pretty minimal.
Let's say a 40 y/o man finds a phone on the ground, sees a name stuck on it, googles "name + town" and finds the facebook of a 12 y/o girl, and messages "Hey I found this phone, do you recognize it? <photo>"
With e2e encryption, you can't easily tell the difference between that and a creep.
This thread is advocating that exactly that case should result in a police visit with the assumption of guilt.
The world is nuanced.
Imagine no e2e for a moment for FB. Policy can be smart enough to pick up that this communication is not represntative or normal. That's part of detection.
Second, a single message to someone on a random phone is not going to flag anything.
Third - there is no assumption of guilt. Not even an arrest is assumption of guilt.
Finally - those are extraordinary corner cases. They will happen, but the get resolved the moment the guy says 'oh, I found this phone' - because that will be 100% clear in that context.
Obviously - things can go awry. Meta flag something as bad, sends it to police - they do not follow procedure, or don't apply something correclty and arrest a guy at his place of work. But in the scenario you described, its literally not a problem - there are 'common sense checks' through the whole thing. The algo, the human making the notification to the police, the police, the judge if a warrant is required. People are not going to be arrested because they found a phone and texted their niece - if that happens, then we have another set of problems.
We can 100% have our 'friendly community' with Facebook.
Now - with an e2e thing like Signal, well, yes, it could theoretically be a problem, but the likelihood of some rando finding a phone, that's not locked, and being able to text some other 12 year old, an effectively 'pose' as their 'contact' - well that's a rare case scenario.
You build the strallman to destroy. We are not talking state, we are talking the social network which advertises itself as safe to children, absolutely has metadata for approximate age and social connections, where one can identify as minor deserving protections, and which social network prefers to increase engagement at *any* cost to its users.