Most everyone would love to see more work on stopping child sexual abuse.
But this is the ultimate "grant me dictatorial powers so I can do good" play.
Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law that suddenly touches everyone even though offenders are a small percentage and should be able to be targeted more efficiently.
Yep, and this is a perfect example of a base rate fallacy situation... even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
Back in the day when I was like 15 and DC++ was still a thing, I used to browse people's shared folders. One day I came across a file called "the paradox of false positive". It was a 1 pager that described how a machine which is 99.9% accurate at identifying terrorists would be completely useless due to this false positive base rate fallacy you're describing.
It really stuck with me throughout the years. It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.
Which begs the question: lets assume the intentions are pure (which we know they're not but lets be generous), what other options are there when 99.9% heuristic is not good enough? how do you design systems when they're guaranteed to fail as they scale up?
>Btw, von der leyen is trying to get stuff like this written down as laws since 2009, it got her the nickname Zensursula.
And Germans and Europeans looked at that and thought the best place for her is leading the EU?!
Remind me again how she got elected in that position?
Because it seems like the entire EU population knew her being infamous for that, except for the few elites who appointed her there via "democratic process" to the head of the EU.
The president of the European Commission is “elected” through a thin pretence of democracy that the people of Europe have effectively no control over, and mostly pay no attention to. If you think she’s there because the greater public decided she’s the best person for the job then you don’t know how the EU works.
Also most of the EU population don’t know her for anything at all. I’d be surprised if more than 50% of Europeans could name her.
Not a single person that is not attached to EU voted for he. She is second hand vote. These roles should all be result of direct vote. This way you only get votes by people who are sucking the money of Eu parliament or. The only position people vote for is EP. And that % is so small, that if they ask the people who didn't vote if they want it, they would have to tear it down.
I am not against EU cooperation, mainly in external security and free market economy. But the system we have is not very democratic, and def not very representative of people. They act like demigods, elected by parliament with no real consequences of their actions.
It's been working for tens of thousands of years. What changed in the last few decades wasn't parenting or technology. It was the rise of the nanny state where the parents gave up the parenting of their kids and entrusted that to educational institutions instead.
1. The cultural factor is rising expectations for children and their parents, costing both time and money;
2. The political/social factor is nanny states and academic institutions that the public expects to not only teach but raise their kids;
3. Technology. Especially the Internet, mobile devices, social media, and short form content. Technology distracts and isolates both kids and parents.
An example of the three factors at work is the all-too-common local news trope of ”Nosy neighbor calls CPS because the family next door lets their kids walk to school. Whole family traumatized as a result.”
It both works and fails, like many other things. But if you hold the goal that it must never fail in sufficiently high esteem, you invariably end up with a system like the one we have now.
If the goal of a system is to never fail, then the bureaucrats in charge of running that system will just game the metrics and cover up all the issue, while it fails first very slowly then very suddenly.
In fact that's why nothing ever gets done to improve things in the EU/west, because we expect perfect outcome in every new change and we want potential risks to be zero before something new is implemented, so it's easier for leaders to just never do anything, never change anything, just sit and maintain the status quo while we go through managed decline complaining things keep slowly getting worse.
The intuition I've built is that you can't talk about a false positive rate being high or low on its own - it's always relative to the actual occurrence rate of positives in the tested population. E.g. if there's a 1 in 10000 risk of a false positive, but real positives also are only 1 out of 10000 tested cases, then a positive case will have a 50/50 chance of being a false positive (because for every 10000 tests, you'll have on average one false positive and one real positive). So a false positive rate can only be said to be low if it's significantly lower than the real occurrence rate of positives.
It really doesn’t, and it is easy to demonstrate by using an extreme example.
Suppose I invent a device that can detect whether there is a giant invisible dragon living in your house, and it has an accuracy of 99.999%
Now, I use it in your house and it tells me there is an invisible dragon… so what are the chances that there is a dragon in your house?
Based on your statement, it would be 99.999% likely that there is an invisible dragon in your house. However, we actually know that there is a 0% chance there is an invisible dragon, so even with the positive test result we still know there is a 0% chance a dragon is there.
No I don't believe it does. I interpret 99.9% accurate to mean 1 in 1000 false positives. If 0.1% of your population are terrorists that means each alert has a 50% chance of being correct. That's nowhere near good enough to fully automate things but it is quite reasonable assuming this is merely information provided to a human agent.
Whereas if only 0.001% of your population are terrorists then 99 out of 100 alerts are false positives at which point the system is well on its way to being useless.
There is an important difference between scenarios where we care about the relative versus absolute frequency of errors.
You're right it doesn't. At least not completely. I was thinking about precision (i.e.: if the test is positive, what are the odds that its prediction is true).
It turns out, that accuracy is not defined as "true positive / (true pos. + true neg.)", but "correct predictions / all predictions".
The whole point of OP's statement: "It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.", which you actually support with your example.
> There is an important difference between scenarios where we care about the relative versus absolute frequency of errors.
The context is chat control without probable cause over the whole population of Europe with a low prevalence.
My point, and presumably that of OP, is that even a small relative frequency of errors will yield an unsustainably high absolute frequncy of errors.
> This is merely information provided to a human agent.
It will be in theory. In practice the human agent will just forward the decision.
A human agent is not sufficient; you need to test only with probable cause for the kind of scenario we're talking about.
The exact opposite of "Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0".
P.S.: The comment I originally replied to choose a very convoluted way of saying that the false discovery rate of the test matters for a proper evaluation. Both you and they explain this by throwing numbers without context in combination with slightly inaccurate definitions. I got the definitions mixed up differently, which led to this follow-up.
I think we largely agree about being opposed to chat control however we seem to disagree somewhat about the underlying reasoning leading us to that conclusion.
> even a small relative frequency of errors will yield an unsustainably high absolute frequncy of errors.
That depends entirely on the rate of true positives in the general population and the rate at which the test successfully catches them. If the success rate is reasonably high and the rate of true positives is within one base ten order of magnitude of the rate of false positives then regardless of volume the stream of reports would be expected to prove quite useful.
To put this in concrete terms, if 1 billion messages are scanned, there are 100 violations, 99 of those violations are successfully detected, and there are an additional 1000 false positives reported, then you've got about a 10% hit rate when examining reports. That would provide a genuinely useful starting point.
But it's not at all clear that we can expect numbers like that. Both because the scanners are likely much worse but also because criminals can't reasonably be expected to stick around on conforming platforms in the event that such measures are enacted.
Even if the reports were 100% accurate I'd still be opposed to it on ideological grounds. I don't think pervasive surveillance of that nature is compatible in the long term with a free and democratic system of government.
> Both you and they explain this by throwing numbers without context in combination with slightly inaccurate definitions.
It was my intent to provide reasoning for all the numbers I put forward. They were meant as examples.
As to definitions I wasn't going by anything formal. I tried to spell out exactly what I meant by each term. Apologies if I wasn't entirely clear about that. Regardless, the precise definitions of the terms aren't what matters here. It's the practical end result - what percentage of the alerts are false?
Bonferonni correction is relevant when you calculate multiple p-values. Most statistical tests are used with a p-value threshold of 5% to reject the null-hypothesis. But because you are repeatedly testing, the probability for false positives increases and that is why you need to decrease the threshold and make it harder, to obtain a p-value below that threshold to declare a significant result.
You typically use the Bonferroni correction when making general statements about a statistical relationship. You wouldn't use it for checking if a particular image shows illegal content. If you kept testing with your image classifier, your significance threshold would need to be continuously lowered and you would asymptotically reach zero.
Google have already caused significant hardship to a father for such kinds of photos. What's particularly galling is how they've continued to maintain they were in the right, despite the police saying no crime had been committed.
Of course google and every other big-tech platform is gonna insta-wipe every account containing detected nudes of children, regardless if you're the parent.
The corporate liability of such content being found on their cloud is so insanely nuclear, that they're not gonna wait and ask you "hey are those nudes your own kids or are you a pedo?" before they wipe the account with all pics off their servers.
And yet the will badger you endlessly to the point their photos app is near unusable to turn on auto sync which slurps up every photo and makes it very awkward to then delete them after. To me, this makes Google a liable party even if real CSAM is stored.
> even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
If the scanner is 99.99% accurate, then most classifications will be correct.
If you scan 1,000,000 pictures (with let's say 10 CSAM), you'll have 100 false positives and 10 true positives, giving you like only 10% correct results
Ah, sorry, I misread what the OP meant by "matches" - thought they were referring to all classifier outputs, while they specifically meant the positives. I changed my original comment to better reflect what I meant, even though that makes it a bit of a non-sequitur now.
Even if 10% of population were actively criminal pedos (which is waaaay too high), its pretty safe to assume that the majority of even their online footprint would be ordinary images/messages.
So a quota of 0.1% or even less material being detectably criminal sounds realistic (probably not much less, though).
Mencken just has the best quotes. Here's a few of my favorites:
> The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
> For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
> Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
I have put up a list of all the MEPs who voted for the urgency procedure yesterday (in breach of EU rules) as well as their voting history on fundamental rights issues and who has been lobbying them:
I cannot see what is causing the issue, the certificate's full chain is sent, the clock is synced, the cert is showing zero errors in OpenSSL - so this is very confusing.
The irony is, you don't actually need Tor on my site because there is no logging, no third parties, no adtech etc. it is just static HTML files - so whereas I would normally recommend Tor I designed the site specifically to be privacy first.
I will try to figure out what is going on though because obviously I am fully supportive of people protecting their privacy with Tor.
Not sure why, it is working fine everywhere else - I see in Tor it gives an invalid certificate error, but the Lets Encrypt certificate is working fine in other browsers, so seems to be a Tor thing specifically.
The bad consequences are diffuse, abstract and distant (conspiracy-looking, tinfoil-like), while it's very easy to viscerally understand that "even if they just save one child, it's already worth it".
They should give precise numbers of how many such crimes are detected via such means or are expected to be detected per year, and how many of those are not possible to catch through regular investigative work. It just seems ridiculously out of proportion especially that with all this flurry around the topic, the criminals surely aren't using WhatsApp for this any more, but especially won't be once the law is adopted. Sure, many are likely stupid but if they are so stupid, won't they fall into other honeypots?
Why are chat apps the best leverage for uncovering this? They'd have to justify this with some sort of data and numbers.
Because later they can just come back and say, well unfortunately they are now all using other means, so now we need to break https,we need to ban e2e, we need to ban vpns, tor and foss operating systems etc etc.
Yeah, and also how many such crimes are actually prosecuted because you know, there is certain island with certain high-ranked people.
Anyways, once that implemented noone will report to you and there will be no means of pushing against it because all your online efforts to coordinate will be compromised.
They should add to those metrics: hours and funds wasted investigating false positives, reputations ruined from false accusations and investigations, decline in public trust, etc.
Voluntary for whom? The service provider? Can I opt out of getting scanned?
> Does it touch encrypted messages? - No. End-to-end encrypted communications were never scanned but providers could deploy client-side scanning under this law.
So it circumvents e2e encryption?
---
How would these laws prevent me from just side loading my own open source client?
You need open hardware and open software at that point and you won't be able to use government identification as they depend on closed source parts of the Android ecosystem. Also you need identification for side loading apps at some point.
Non of these laws stop you from opting out of surveillance, but altogether it gets so hard that at some point you get more suspicious and tracked if you do all this than if you don't do any of these.
I don't understand. How does it affect encrypted messages? It seems like either you need:
1. allow MITM decryption by a privileged authority
2. require all devices doing E2EE have a non-user-modifiable piece of functionality to scan on-device
The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner? I have to say that I do sometimes think about it while taking a photo of my baby playing in the bathtub - photos like my parents have of me which have been kind of nice to see later. It would be a pity if I had to have a separate analog camera just for baby photos because then I'd need to learn the whole developing film stuff.
Haha, we do have those Instax Mini cameras. They make for a nice dose of nostalgia. We have a big frame full of photos of our friends and family on the wall and it's nice to walk by.
Apple's proposal was only for photos being uploaded to iCloud and not local ones.
IIRC weren't there some thoughts that they'd switch iCloud to E2E but add local scanning on upload (compare to what it currently when Apple, Google, etc. freely scan all your cloud photos anyway). That didn't seem like a terrible deal on paper.
Does this mean every parent has to now make sure not to take pictures of their children playing in bath for instance, in order not to trip these scans for false positives?
No. iCloud Photos and Files are and have always been non-e2ee and they already scan everything in it.
Even with e2ee enabled for iCloud Photos/files (which NOBODY uses, and furthermore is entirely disabled in the UK), it sends identifying hashes of plaintext file content to the server without e2ee.
> The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner?
This is exactly what has been proposed. E.g. WhatsApp has a piece of code that scans images and texts before sending. After that, they are "encrypted".
This is of course a massive privacy violation, since the code that scans for CSAM can be switched out to scan for anything else at any time. (It's even easier to do now than when Apple first proposed it, as language models since have gotten good at reading images.)
I am not fully acquainted with the details, but I would not discard (3) make e2ee illegal, at least for platforms of certain size etc. That is what the proponents ultimately want anyway. If they settle for anything else, it's because of the resistance.
That is a much more simple prediction. I do use Telegram with our family claw-like and it does not do E2EE by default. You need to do a secret chat or whatever. I think you're probably right. We'll just lose E2EE.
You are correct in that both option 1 and 2 are possible. For end-to-end encrypted messages only option 2 is possible. The content will be scanned directly on your own device and the data will be sent to the authorities without your knowledge, if the software detects something suspicious. This is called client-side-scanning.
The proposed Apple system was at least more restrained in that it was looking to identify known abuse images. Which is better than the Google one which aims to identify new unseen content which constantly flags parents acting legally sharing photos to medical professionals.
There are in betweens of an iphone and analog camera. You can use a digital camera with an SD card that you plug into a laptop that never connects to internet.
So the average person is having to set up an air gapped system to store normal family photos while while Epstein's clients and co conspirators communicate over plain text Gmail and for some reason we can't do anything about it.
If so-called "tech" companies are allowed to have control over internet users' communications ("chat control"), where control over communications lies _exclusively with the company, not the user_,^1 then it stands to reason that governments, among others, may influence how that control is exercised
Unlike governments, generally, the companies may use control over communications for any purpose. For example, a surveillance-based advertising services is one purpose that we know about. The companies can collaborate with any party; it may be another another company, it may be a government. The company can utilise surveillance data collected and/or its ability to throttle and censor communications to further any purpose. The parties with whom the company collaborates may potentially use the data for any purpose
Unfortunately for users, the company is not required to disclose with whom it collaborates nor the terms of such collaborations. Hence users have no way to verfiy. Users of these "free services", have few, if any, rights against the company
This situation is preventable. What enables it to exist is user "consent" to ceding control over their private communications ("chat control") to so-called "tech" companies
1. This is accomplished through granting the company total control over the client software, e.g., "automatic updates'. The company effectvely (a) blocks chat participants from using their own client software and (b) forces chat participants to use client software controlled by the so-called 'tech" company. This software is provided for free and primarily serves the company, not the user, advancing the company's commercial interests, e.g., surveillance-based advertising services, at the expense of the user's privacy and security interests
The same governments pushing for this type of regulation are also the ones that fail to condemn high profile individuals involved in the crimes that these regulation are supposed to help fight. Makes you really wonder if it's about protecting the children.
There are plenty of friends of that one famous financier roaming the old continent, who probably won't ever see a courtroom or prison cell in their lifetime, despite a lot of incriminating evidence.
Well it's privacy from private companies. The government still needs to see everything you do just in case. Its not like you have anything to do hide? Do you?
I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
Meanwhile, Governments can take away your freedom, block your right to speech, ruin your entire life, seize your private assets/wealth, take away your children, deport you, etc...all depending on how the cultural wind is blowing on a particular day. And they are legally entitled to hold a gun to your head or kill you if you don't comply.
These are not the same level of risk. Yet more hysterical attention is paid to the former instead of the latter. This is dumb.
Be more worried about governments. Read more history.
> I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
A reminder that governments can buy from private companies. A company like Palantir can buy data from private companies then incorporate it into the software it sells to governments.
Exactly. And it is also incredibly short-sided and naive to push for more power for the government when you think it is just going to be used by "your side" for the issues you care about. When you want to wield those powers to promote your own ends against those you oppose, don't be surprised when those you oppose come into power and use those same powers back against you.
Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.
Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.
In general I would agree that say, walmart, is mostly interested in encouraging you to shop at their stores more frequently with the information they gather, it's also true that other corporations are currently selling the information they gather to the government.
And, of course, if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power, in the USA this would include things like state governors / attorneys, federal legislators, presidents, etc, all of whom have some level of influence over my information being collected and used.
If I dislike what walmart is doing, my options are considerably more limited. I can lobby for a law to be passed against it or I can essentially wish for it to go out of business.
> Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.
False dichotomy, they are the same Lernaean Hydra.
> if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power
How has that been going? Did you manage to elect someone, who made a positive change? Let's be charitable - you can pick an example from your life that goes back up to 50 years.
> Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.
No. My point is you should fear centralized power in general, and in exact proportion to the scope of the power being centralized. All power gets abused.
Governments are centralized power on a scale that makes the most powerful corporation on earth look like an ant. Historically AND currently, the worst atrocities come from governments, not companies.
Yet, internet discourse (and new legislation) over the past 10 years has pretended like the biggest threat to us re: data collection is private companies. They are indeed a threat. But they are NOWHERE near the scale of the threat that data collection by governments represents.
This blind spot is part of the reason mass surveillance legislation is being rolled out (largely successfully) everywhere right now.
For example, we've created such a boogieman out of facebook/social media (which, ironically, doesn't even exist anymore as people remember it) that it has manufactured consent among the public for governments building the infrastructure for 1984. A far greater threat to us than micro-targeted face cream ads ever were.
So your position is that, because Coca Cola once funded paramilitary action in South America...companies are a worse threat to us than governments?
You don't seem able to hold two ideas in your head.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. Yes, governments can abuse their power.
However, the power wielded by governments is on a whole different scale, so the capacity for abuse and atrocity is exponentially larger (governments have killed millions and can literally destroy the entire world with firepower 100X over).
Companies fall under the government. So what a company harvests (to sell more toilet bowl cleaner), is accessible to the government it falls under.
By that logic, you should fear companies at least as much as their governments when handing them your data.
But companies have additional goals: to increase profit.
Which can be achieved by selling more toilet bowl cleaner. But also by externalising harm/pollution/costs, monopolising, reducing taxes, etc. All of which harm you, personally.
So, sure, worry about governments. But worry more about (big) companies. Read more history.
Governments have a monopoly on violence, companies generally do not.
This fact alone makes the comparison you’re trying to make pretty silly. You have far, far more to fear from the country from which you’re a citizen than the company for which you’re a customer.
Also, governments consists of a large amount of human each acting for their own benefit. Assuming they can easily collectively united as a single force to use violence to harm all citizen (on the topic of privacy, it really is the case) suddenly is wild.
On the contrary, for a limited government, it very likely will result in using the monopoly of violence to provide extreme capitalism style IP and private property protection which results in dominating power of large companies. On the other hand, every bit of history demonstrated you can never maintain monopoly of violence if you are really against people.
Monopoly on economic is strong because it can be guarded by violence, while violence cannot be easily guarded by itself within a country (unless AI overlord really comes).
This is actually a fantastic example of the blindspot I'm talking about.
You fundamentally are unable to judge risk correctly due to your political bias.
You're even admitting the risk of companies harvesting data is that it may fall in the hands of governments.
Yet you still think a private company lobbying to reduce taxes is a greater threat than your government wielding enough firepower to kill millions of people and destroy the entire world.
The distinction is very much blurred, and there is much more profitable way to use data than getting people to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
Companies can use it to determine voting patters and sell that to interested political parties. Government are made from political parties and can steer money to those parties, thus the data can now be sold indirectly to the government.
Companies can use it to indirectly target competitors through their customers. Creating a monopoly is much more profitable than just selling more products. Gaining favors with political parties in the above strategy can also help here.
Companies can sell data to governments of other countries. Just because your own government has laws that forbids it, it doesn't mean other countries has the same laws or will treat the citizens of your country as their own. Trade like this can also occur in multiple steps. Company sell data to country A, and country A shares/sells it to your own government. Your own government might finds this preferable to buy it directly as laws may not apply to data shared/bought, even if that data is about their own citizens.
Selling personal data to the government is profitable, but there are also other interested parties. People in legal disputes may want information about the other side, or the juries, or even the judge. Companies that want to do industry espionage would want to buy information about other companies employees. Criminal organizations very much like to buy information about vulnerable people like the elderly. Again, the data doesn't need to be sold directly but can go through many hands until it finally reach the most scummy buyers, and the money will slowly trickle upwards to the seller.
As long as someone collects the data and is willing to sell it to someone, sooner or later it will be sold/leaked to someone who shouldn't have it. That is the fundamental issue with companies collecting personal information.
>I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
I keep trying to explain to people that any data companies harvest, for whatever purpose, can then be accessed by the government, and that trying to draw distinctions in what is a big massive ouroboros is irrelevant.
Even if you trust the company AND trust the government, the data exists forever, and no one can trust all future governments and all future corporations.
The root issue is still government having absurdly asymmetric power over you.
If the government weren't legally able to use the toilet bowl cleaner companies data against you, it wouldn't matter.
The problem is us giving governments the right to use this data against us (passports to access the internet, messages being under constant surveillance, etc.)
In Europe we're happily handing over our rights every day so that governments have more power over us (supposedly to "protect" us from the big bad evil American tech companies).
Except, Google just wants to make $100/yr off me instead of $50/yr by me voluntarily choosing to use them.
Meanwhile, EU governments want to literally control what I think and feel and do, and take out $100,000 in debt on the backs of each of my children (we're at 115% debt-to-GDP in France) to fund this nightmare surveillance state.
The law can change. Which is why it's better if that data was not collected in the first place.
Plenty of companies collecting data are operated by people who want to control what you think, feel, and do both for profit and based on their owners personal beliefs.
Look trying to separate them is foolhardy. Corporations exist due the limitation of corporate liability provided by government. There's no scenario where you have a corporation without government. A corporation will sell you out wholesale to continue having the right to make 100 bucks a year off of people.
> is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
And to steal tips [1], lower your salary [2,3], charge you more [3,4], and limit how you may use "your" property [5]. I'm sure there are many I've missed.
Oh and how could I forget - to smear you if you stand in their way [6].
Oh the horror, they might try to lower your salary forcing you to find another competing employer!
Meanwhile governments wield enough power to destroy the entire world 100X over, and are currently shoveling young boys into the meat grinder of war to be slaughtered by the thousands every day.
As a left-leaning forum, HN has a giant blind spot re: government power vs. corporate power. I'm trying to point this out.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. But their power pales in comparison to government power.
The "right" is usually only against government control, intervention and surveillance until they get into power. Then they double down on them. Also right wing parties/groups are generally better at controlling and silencing internal opposition (since they are lot better shutting up and falling in line when push comes to shove regardless of their personal beliefs). So they are usually a lot more effective at imposing these things.
At this point I think it's obvious that EU is in turmoil. They're struggling to come to grips with the idea of a Russian invasion on their eastern borders, and simultaneously USA pivoting to Asia and not willing to front their defense after 40+ years of imploring them to do so themselves.
They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.
But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare, and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.
> Also, EU countries in Eastern Europe do already have a high military spending, and even Western European countries are improving.
I would really challenge that idea that increasing military spending will create a solid and useful military force.
Most of the money you inject within the military industrial complex is wasted and stolen. At some point it can become counterproductive, we can see it with the US military where recently Iran’s $30k shahed drone destroys $300M US radars.
Note that today's politician never state goals in practical military terms but rather in billions and trillions spent. So they are always victorious.
I do not remember Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte or Genghis Khan stating their objectives in terms of money spent.
>I would really challenge that idea that increasing military spending will create a solid and useful military force.
Germany is the EU proof of that. It outpends France at defense spending but its military is massively smaller and less capable, and also non-nuclear to boot. So they're getting a very poor bang for their buck. Mostly because of bureaucracy and corruption are eating most of their money before it gets spent on the troops.
>Most of the money you inject within the military industrial complex is wasted and stolen.
That's why I'm not holding my breath at the whole "German rearmament" propaganda. Most of the money will go to boost the stock of Rheinmetall and friends, not boost the troops.
It's hopeless. Enormous amounts of money is flowing out of Europe into China and the US. Europe has dogshit to offer. You already see it with gdp not growing. Whereas rest of the world did grow. Even Russia has higher GDP growth than Germany. Euro leadership is not smart.
>They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.
The EU is about twice as industrialized as the US is, In the town of Unterlüß of four thousand people Germany produces about half as many artillery shells as the entire US does (and nationally alone now produces more) and Ukraine and Europe have, for the last 18 months, defended Ukraine without about any support from anyone else. Where do you get your information about Europe, on twitter?
What i found the most fascinating, is that they say its to protect children. But when you look at real child abuse cases, there are huge gaps in sentencing, policing and protecting kids in all countries. Where i live child abuser will get lower sentence than someone who sold weed.
There is a lot of real police work that can be done, honey trap pedos on roblox, infiltrate public whatsapp groups to check and monitor for soliciting. Actually listening and responding to child abuse. Work with schools. But this just requires real work. They don't want to do real work. And at the end, it will get thrown out by some senile corrupted judge.
It's 100% about control - it's the same in the UK.
Last year it was about having to scan your face to verify your age to access porn (to protect the children). They said: It's not about control, it's about protecting children.
Last month the same government announced they will use the same technology to prevent access to Youtube and Twitter without giving over your ID and confirming who you are... Still under the 'protecting the children' banner.
Because of the excessive growing corruption in the EU, their politicians have decided to restrict all opposition. This corruption is hidden behind double-speak, demonization and censorship. Even putting people in prison who talk about the crimes that they endured.
Instead of using the criticism to improve the system, the corrupt system starts to attack and forbid the criticism.
"A temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive that allowed (but did not require) providers to scan private messages of unsuspected users for potential child sexual abuse material."
Does that imply it's currently not allowed?
EDIT: apparently not enforced at least:
"Chat Control 1.0 expires
The legal ground for voluntary, indiscriminate scanning ends. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap state they will continue scanning private messages regardless. "
They could make all e2ee chats, group chats. Where instead of a 1-1 chat between two people or many-many chat between a lot of people, they do 1-1+1 or many-many+1, where the +1 is the government. Technically the underlaying company or anyone else still won't have access to messages and e2ee won't be "broken", except for the fact that there's one more party in the key exchange.
Or they scan at the edge on the user's device.
Either way, both are very prone to false positives and and very much privacy invading.
Scan on end user's devices, but never transmit the result of that. Only report it ON the device itself to the user. A false positive when you send a pic of your naked kid to your spouse might show a warning icon asking you if you are sure you want to send it.
Also: for minors (Who is a minor not determined by some central age verification, but by me specifying in the Apple/Android family settings who my kids are) you could make sending certain things it blocking or subject to parent approval. E.g. if my daughter is tricked into sending nudes, it's something that's handled the same as if she wants to install an app or visit a specific web page.
No encryption is ever backdoored. Anything beyond this, e.g. reporting any user actions, would be allowed only through a court, just like any wiretapping always was.
People (well, the European Parliament, which is arguably the closest approximation) have clearly and repeatedly opposed Chat Control.
The Commission is an expression of _governments_ (and this one in particular is the result of painstaking compromise) and is only loyal to presidents and prime ministers. It has no accountability to the EP, and it shows.
Conservatives and right-wing. Gives them more control. It‘s a pattern that gets obvious once you see it. It’s so they can hide their own secrets better. In Germany, we have a law that grants you access to information, the "Informationsfreiheitsgesetz“. This was used in the past to uncover morally wrong or illegal behavior, mostly done by the conservative party. This party, as they are currently in charge, is now actively working to change the law, so it's in their benefit.
I’m not familiar with the political landscape in Europe so it may well be mostly people on the right pushing this, but man I wish we could stop framing everything as left vs right.
That framing is distracting us from the authoritarian vs civil liberties issues, which is a dangerous and immediate threat to our ability to have any significant political influence of any kind.
Conservative politicians and leaders as they label themselves and practically act in today's political landscape are fundamentally on the authoritarian and anti-civil liberties side - there is no distraction. The right is only worse in the extent of authoritarianism and destruction of human rights they're willing to go to and the speed at which they want to achieve it.
If a conservative wants to preserve some status quo, basically all policy they use (and have available as a tool) in a permanently changing and developing world (socially, technologically) is that of restrictions, especially on civil rights, and of authoritarian mechanisms like police power. For weird reasons, conservatives never* want to preserve status quo civil rights like workers rights, freedom of information rights and similar that are anti-authoritatian.
Sadly does not really seems tied to left or right directly.
In Spain (you can see this in the website) our traditional left and right parties are largely in favor, while the parties in both ends of the spectrum (at the lack of better term: far left and far right) seem to be largely against.
The sad thing is that it seems that the parties that are already established or likely to alternative in power are the ones that are pushing for it, and this makes it very difficult to fight against
Interesting - maybe my view is biased. So it's about the people that are in power or more likely to be in power. Hm. Makes sense, thinking about it. Maybe power does, in fact, change your principles.
This again, according to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ for Germany, Chat Contol is generally supported by de-facto left-wing(support immigration, social security, LGBT movement, positive discrimination, progressive tax, worker rights) CDU and CSU (29 of 34 "Yes" votes with 97 votes in total)
pirate parties are usually considered left wing and they all vote against. privacy is a big part of their platform.
there is more than one left wing faction in the eu - we got greens (more radical and oppose chat control), s&d (mainstream parties like german spd, mostly support), the left (hardcore socialist/communists) and renew europe (centrist liberals). none of them are completely united on this.
far right parties are also against chat control most of the time. christian parties (moderate right wing) support it for moral reasons. its really more of a establishment/alternative issue than left/right.
So, ChatControl 1.0 (the volontary, limited one that expired and is being revived) has been active for about 2 years now.
Concretely, are there documented examples of abuses ? Are the checks & balance sufficient ? I understand ChatControl 2.0 goes way beyond, be it goes "beyond" enough that it does not get a majority in parlement, and can't move forward.
But for CC1.0 we don't need to imagine anymore - we have 2 years of application. Is that enough to evaluate ?
That's down to how the EU works. These kind of decisions are made in multiple governing bodies. There's the council, which is made up of representatives from member states governments and the parliament, which is made up of directly elected MEPs.
The national government of Bulgaria's position isn't necessarily in line with Bulgarian MEPs.
> EU politicians spend more time on chat control than on the reopening of Hormuz
I thought I'd heard it all here on HN, but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.
The US is now getting money from every ship passing the street. How people not see that for the US the world is a game of command and conquer. They rule everything and if it's not ruled it gets bombed.
>but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot
Please don't pretend to misunderstand a point just to manufacture the opportunity to reply in bad faith.
Nobody in EU is saying the EU should clean up others' mess around the world, people are just saying the EU should be busy building domestic capacity and capabilities to insulate itself from the issues caused by others around the world, such as securing domestic energy supplies so that the next time USrael blows up the middle east, the EU can just eat it no issue indead of being at the mercy of foreign oligarchs for overpriced energy.
US is so monetary rich and energy rich that they can afford to blow up the middle east every 10 years with little domestic consequences for them, and still have enough gas to drive their Ford F-450s Super Duty to Walmart, heat their pools and AC their homes, without leading to national unrest, but EU is so energy starved that securing energy independence should have been a national security issue for the past 20 years already, not since 2022.
And not just energy, EU is exposed in other areas as well (SW, AI, semiconductors, lithium batteries, agriculture, manufacturing, defense, etc), and again, it will only wake up in panic mode at the 11th hour when US or China twists their arm in some spontaneous international dispute. But politicians instead of focusing on preemptively securing these vulnerabilities BEFORE shit hits the fan, are too busy focusing on controlling people's privacy, which is what EU citizens and commenters here are criticizing.
> people are just saying the EU should be busy building domestic capacity and capabilities to insulate itself from the issues caused by others around the world
If this is what you wanted to have said, say that from the beginning instead of leaving some vague and ambiguous "general complaint about the Strait of Hormuz" and maybe others like me will understand you better.
Somehow you seem to imply none of those things are happening right now in Europe, is this really your perspective? You think no one is thinking about domestic energy supplies? Do you not understand how EU works? Lots of things are happening in parallel, not the least a lot of work around energy dependency and other core infrastructure issues.
>Somehow you seem to imply none of those things are happening right now in Europe, is this really your perspective? You think no one is thinking about domestic energy supplies? Do you not understand how EU works? Lots of things are happening in parallel, not the least a lot of work around energy dependency and other core infrastructure issues.
"The purpose of a system is what it does". So far there's no sign of any progress, it's just getting worse. The Draghi report was two years ago and nothing has been done to address the issues it raised.
Either the EU opens Hormuz or the EU pays twice the pre war rate for gas / oil indefinitely. Of course at least they can put the subjects that bitch about it in jail now.
Like a lot of the rest of the world they would probably rather take the alternative option and accelerate the transition to clean energy. Has the upside of not handing more power to an authoritarian state on the other side of the Atlantic that clearly hates them and routinely threatens them.
Well everyone pays the same for oil (unless there are export/import control and adjusted by transportation costs) worldwide.
So americans will be paying 2x as well its just that some of that money will stay in the country instead of going to the middle easter or US (which happens to be the largest supplier of oil to the EU)
Back in 2025 EU imported ~15% from the gulf. China was over 40% and Japan at 95%...
how is EU supposed to open hormuz? do you expect them to raise armies and go to war over a shipping lane? I think US demonstrated plenty enough this is not a viable strategy (this was known for the past 50 years)
Would've been so much better to reduce the scope of your comment to just energy security.
I don't see how the EU lived live with already higher energy prices compared to the US for so long and still don't make better renewable policy top priority.
When it comes to online actions people ask for way more than reasonable. You dont get to be an invisible, impossible to track, unaccountable hacker man free to roam the internet on equal footing to the rest of the users.
This is a strawman argument. Almost no one who wants to preserve their right to free and open communication without government knowledge or interference, wants that so that they can hack.
It’s not about catching hackers or child predators, it’s about government control.
Even if there was no lobbying or corruption, the EU is structurally flawed: the Council, which is made up of 27 mandates that were given for local politics, is used by nations to launder their domestically unpopular laws through an EU indirection layer, the Commission has no electoral link (VDL was appointed, when afaik the Parliament should nominate a Commission President), the Parliament, the legislative body, has no legislative initiative, and despite rejecting laws drafted by the Commission, as we've seen, those laws can be forced through indefinitely until the Commission gets the rubber stamp it needs.
i think a good general rule is anyone with ultimate power over some area (president, lawmakers, supreme court judges) should be elected. thats anyone whos decisions cant be reversed by someone else above them. those who make final but reversible decisions (pm, ministers, heads of military and intelligence) should be directly appointed by someone who was elected. if you allow indirect appointments to important positions you get a corrupt undemocratic government.
As a EU citizen I’m at a loss for what to do about this. I feel that they’re going against any average citizen’s interest. What can we do to make them stop?
Short-term, follow the steps on the website and contact your political representative to explain to them why it's such a bad idea.
Long-term, switch to another messenger app that's opensource and truly E2E encrypted.
That also shows why this is such a foolish proposal.
The truly scary people are not on the "consumer" chat apps anyway and most certainly will be the first ones to switch to another communication channel if this passes. If this will have any effect it'll be that some, "dumb" criminals will be caught.
Vote for parties that oppose this nonsense. In the meantime, install Linux on your desktop/laptop, and a free Android variant on a compatible phone. Use Signal, and urge your family and friends to do the same.
Would these measures have prevented, for instance, the generalized Rape Gangs they had in the UK and that were hidden by the authorities to keep some weird idea of social peace?
To everyone who wants to dismantle the EU: this is not the solution. Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies. The UK left the EU and implemented its own version of chat control - Online Safety Act - without any transparency or real opposition. The right solution is the political fight. Europe is our home. We must keep it in good shape by getting rid of anything that makes it worse - like Chat Control.
That offensive law (every car owner must keep a breathalizer item in the vehicle ready for use) was famous in the "issued but not enforced" category.
But the mandate to keep "equipment" in the car is very different from kill-switches depending on sensors and embedded in electronics - the poster seems to have meant this.
Did they? That makes a good amount of difference, you know. Especially when "they" may be a vocal exception.
> How is this supposed to prove anything
Prove what. Nothing seems to be disproven.
Edit: look, if you were trying to negate a "bad A" through an "(also) bad B", review and revise your logic. Which is important because that non-argument has been exploited to bend the political opinion of street-rubes to CEO-rubes for the past few years ("Bad Springfield hence [...] not bad Vernapool").
Look, this was a headline I recalled seeing in the news. I do not live in the US, and honestly I'm kinda tired of hearing as much about your (?) politics. If I hadn't used the uncertainty qualifier, I would have been lying.
That said, I believe it did pass almost unanimously, coming into effect in 2027 or something. The law in question required all cars come equipped with intoxication detection systems and refuse to start failing that check.
> vocal exception
I'm not from there, yet even I can tell the system is as broken as it could be. There are two parties funded by almost the same oligarchs, one advocating for open fascism and the other aimlessly laundering elite interests in nominal progressivism, while being more concerned with exterminating actual leftists within than tackling their opposition. You've steadily passed age verification in most major states, followed by a bipartisan federal bill.
Your system does the same thing as EU-steadily laundering corporate agenda into legislation. At least in most of the EU, this shared disease hasn't progressed into the stage of eroding so much of workers rights and basic environmental protections. But with the recent populist currents, I can imagine the median voter will vote for their starvation if only to spite the brown people.
> Bad Springfield hence not bad Vernapool
The argument that started this thread was that the EU itself needs to be entirely abolished because it produces laws of this nature.
If you apply that same standard, do you think cessation is what the US states should do too? Well, these same laws easily pass into state legislation too. All you'd be doing is delaying the inevitable, if you don't cut the problem at its root.
by educating our fellow co-citizens about who to vote for. This is not an issue of the EU, but about the politicians in power and them caving in on lobbyists from economy side and fascists
That translates to "capillary education, to the point of fixing structural systemic issues", measure needed generations ago.
We have damages now. The car systems destroyed. How would we be able to fix that, to revert from that and the rest of the damages - which they are carrying on perpetrating as we speak, inventing new.
This is not any more a matter of prevention, it is a matter of fixing the past and preventing the future predictable damages.
The EU is beyond reform, this law targets exactly this: nascent political projects that threaten the status quo.
I believe that the EU will cause so much strife that the long peace we've enjoyed on the continent will be brought to an end, not because of the EU, but because of the wedges drawn between pro-EU and EU-skeptic countries.
No, every country remains sovereign. Hungary's previous regime ignored the EU for over a decade. Many countries are instituting border controls again despite the Schengen agreement.
>Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies.
I don't like this comparison at all. Europe, the land that housed, fed and scarified my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called the EU that does not represent me nor speak in my name.
Empires, monarchies, governments and all such man-made institutions like the EU get torn down all time, when they become too bloated, incompetent, corrupt and cronyistic and lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people. See all human history.
Forests go through prescribed burns in order to be saved, for their own good, and so must political institutions. And when the rot is too big, it can't simply be "patched" anymore, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch with fresh new people, which in turn will get corrupted over time and get torn down, and so on, rinse and repeat because that's human nature.
Ironically, the EU has achieved its goal of uniting all Europeans, as in they're all now united via hating what the EU has become and what it's doing.
Let's stop the blut and soil BS right here. I am all for european panationalism but don't pretend that Europe is "your house" where "your ancestors" were. You come from a very specific culture inside it which has its own specific language and traditions and that has spent most its history warring with its neighbours, sometimes people in the next village speaking a different version of your lanuage. My ancestors and your ancestor probably scarified each other, the land didn't
Turns out unifying a lot of different countries that have different languages and interest is a hard problem and in order to satisfy everyone a little bureaucracy is the price to pay. You may find it too bloated, too slow or even too corrupt but burning it to the ground is a lunacy for people who entertain clean slate delusions: Whenever it happens, it is a catastrophy for everyone but a few opportunists.
Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement. Now it can stay an economic union and big powers can pick and choose how to manipulate each one of us for their own purposes or it can strive to be a political union and have a standing on the international stage. We're not there yet but we will, eventually, we just need to hang tight. Things take time.
>Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement.
Not really. South American countries don't go to war with each other and they don't have a union. Nor do central American countries.
You may argue these were all in the 19th century, and that is true. It's possible South America learned their lesson from the world wars. An alternative explanation is the presence of the US. It was never going to let another regional power roll up smaller states in the Western hemisphere so there was no point in being expansionist.
And that's not counting the Falklands war because Britain doesn't feel like it belong in the neighborhood but it's still an invasion of sovereign territory out of nationalistic motives
I'll grant none of those was a major conflict and that it's an interesting case but still.
Maybe the fact that apart from Brazil, they have a language in common makes it harder to sell the neighbour as a foreigner ? What else could it be ? I am genuinely curious
I'm just noticing that only European people seem to be disallowed from calling their land "their land" and outsiders "outsiders". it's "blut and soil", as if the men who fought Nazis fought Nazis for some high-minded ideals rather than their land and their people.
Oh, you're just noticing are you ?
Who are those people who are "disallowing" you from calling your land your land ? How do you handle living under such oppression ?
Just come out of the woods will you
It turns out people don't like to be invaded, yes, simple as. Of course you would very much like to convince everyone that immigration is just the same as an invasion and thus, the same way to deal with it is justified. So just say so instead of dancing around and posing as the victim.
Would you also tell that to native American Indians? Or to the Japanese? Or to the Indians?
It's no BS unless you've been brainwashed and make massive efforts to ignore reality. Blood based belonging to a place is hardwired in every culture and society on the planet, from Asia to the Americas. NA, UK, AU, NZ, and the EU just have added a lot of PR paint on top to pretend it doesn't exist in their liberal societies, but it does, except it's much more under the table and subversive.
>a little bureaucracy is the price to pay.
Taking away people's privacy and freedom of speech is a little more problematic than just "a little bureaucracy".
>Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement.
That WAS an achievement in the past, but if you dissolve the EU institution tomorrow, no former EU member state will suddenly got to war with their neighbour just because the EU doesn't exist anymore. So the myth that the EU is somehow preventing war in EU today is bogus. That was history, this is today.
> Would you also tell that to native American Indians? Or to the Japanese? Or to the Indians?
If they were saying to me what you wrote that $big_chunk_of_land "is the land that housed, fed and scarified my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called" $state_institution, I would laugh them off, yes
> Taking away people's privacy and freedom of speech is a little more problematic than just "a little bureaucracy"
I mean yes but it is ultimately your framing. It's concerning and worth being fought against but no worse that what US was, is or has tried to do, and despite the corrupt buffoon at its head right now, it is not a dictatorship yet. What we need is a good balance of powers and well-designed institutions, and not as you suggested, to destroy it.
> That WAS an achievement in the past, but if you dissolve the EU institution tomorrow, no former EU member state will suddenly got to war with their neighbour just because the EU doesn't exist anymore. So the myth that the EU is preventing war in EU is bogus. That was history, this is today.
Fair enough but that does not warrant the use of the past, it IS an achievement.
Also, give it time and history will do its thing. Remove the EU and, sooner or later, war will come back. The same way that if you remove the counter-powers, tyranny will come back
EDIT:
You added this part about in response to my blood and soil line afterwards:
> It's no BS unless you've been brainwashed and make massive efforts to ignore reality. Blood based tribalism and ingroup preference is hardwired in every culture and society on the planet, from Asia to the Americas. NA, UK, AU, NZ, and the EU just have added a lot of PR paint on top to pretend it doesn't exist in their liberal societies, but it does except it's much more under the table and subversive.
Interesting how people seem to think reality is on their side and people who think otherwise must have been brainwashed.
Anyways, is it hardwired or is it "soft" wired ? Are we only responding to our wiring or did we manage to create cultures around it or are we condemned to an endless loop of prewired behaviours ?
Sexual desire is also "hardwired" in us and yet we finally managed to no rape each other based on dominance hierarchies. Is that the kind of society you are looking forward to ? One based on some kind of supposedly natural order ?
Yes tribalism does exist, we know what kind of world it produces. It's utter shit. Poverty and misery for everyone but the people at the top.
I swear you people are so bored that you cannot appreciate the sheer amount of material wealth you are effing bathing in. You dream of an heroic past that never existed where you get to be the hero.
Ha the times where being a man with no other skills than violence could get you riches ! Let's conveniently forget about most people, living under the boot in a life of injustice and life-threatening poverty.
I agree on the base of the argument. EU after all was created because of one tragedy. I'm absolutely sure that there will be more gruesome wars on the continent and I even wouldn't rule out the collapse in the future because petty tribalism holding everything back as always.
"Eurobarometer by the EU shows Europeans love the EU"
seems legit lol
Probably because most Europeans are clueless and brainwashed by MSM pro-EU propaganda, and never hear about the nasty things the EU tries to do like chat control, age-ID, car surveillance, or taxing parcels.
To most Europeans EU just means going to Spain on vacation and going to work in Germany for more money, anything else stupid the EU does never reaches them directly until much later when the second order effects hit but then it must be because the fault of Putin or Trump.
Most Europeans are pretty detached from EU politics. If you ask them who their EU MEPs /representative are most have no clue without googling, they just know some of the ones in their own country, but EU politics might as well be on another planet.
>"Eurobarometer by the EU shows Europeans love the EU"
seems legit lol
Probably because most Europeans are clueless and brainwashed by MSM pro-EU propaganda, and never hear about the nasty things the EU tries to do like chat control, age-ID, car surveillance, or taxing parcels.
So which is it?
Are the stats fake, or are Europeans actually saying this because they are brainwashed?
Because you are trying to have both. First, official EU polling is illegitimate propaganda. Then, in the next breath, you explain why Europeans really do support the EU. That means the poll is not fake. You just hate the answer.
Every result you dislike is fake, and every person who disagrees with you is brainwashed. Very brave epistemology.
Exactly. This is ridiculous behavior. Simple solutions for complex problems are usually the wrong ones.
One griefer which promised prosperit fueled Brexit, which caused Britain visible stagnation and now he is a candidate for MP promising to fixing it all yet again.
I need to repeat, that Simple solutions for complex problems usually do not work.
the eu has always been an instrument of american imperialism. leader like ursula was casted away of german politics for corruption and most of the other big names had ties to american companies like goldman sachs or’other financial institution. the eu is a prison for all of us. for a moment germany thought they could use it as an instrument to win and crush its biggest competitors (france and uk) but now they dont have an energy sector (lost thanks to their dear american friend bombing nordstream and foreign countries financing an anti nuclear narrative) and as such they now also lost the heart of their economy : their industry. the final nail in the coffin is spain opening the gates to millions of mens from less developed countries while major european economies have record youth unemployment.
its a crime against what was not so long ago some of the greatest nations on earth. now were as citizen are living under a distopia of urss with the worst of capitalism combined with the worst of communism. mass surveillance, removal of all personal freedom (freedom of speech, right to own property and cars, right to inherit, right to have a nation for our people, harshnpunishment for any contestation’up to jail timz for memes while at the same time very lenient justice toward murderers, rapists and other criminals.)
we gave away our right to exist and be nations and we did that without even a fight
russia was indeed the ones who pushed germany to be reliant on their energy instead of going for nuclear. they funded green party to do that. and germany on their side then voted laws and pushed eu to remove nuclear from green energies list so that france wouldnt have an edge against germany shooting themselves in the foot
Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house
I'm not an expert, but isn't "your own house" should rather be your country in this analogy? It ought to be still there without some bureaucratic institution on top of it.
Just think "neighborhood", no? This seems like splitting hairs... And to what end? to take a shot at EU supra-national structure? ("What, you don't ally to your country?" kinda shade.)
Maybe “your own city” would be a more precise metaphor than “your own house”. Your country is your house, but the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
The concept of a modern nation is also relatively new. It emerged as an identity for groups of people who were no longer defined mainly by the monarchs ruling over them. That identity replaced the king as the symbol of belonging.
But now nationalism is often doing the opposite. Instead of freeing people from old power structures, it is holding Europe back.
So yes, maybe it is not literally “your house”, but the point still stands. Burning down the city around your house is not exactly a smart move either.
>the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
If you measure "function" by the relative economic and military power of the country, then the EU has overwhelmingly degraded the function of its initial members compared to when they joined.
> If you measure "function" by the relative economic and military power of the country, then the EU has overwhelmingly degraded the function of its initial members compared to when they joined.
Very sure that when the EU was still in its infancy, we had only "west Europe" in arms, vs a USSR (aka all the eastern states and Russia). Now all those states are part of NATO and the EU.
Instead of the border to the closest hostile nation (Russia) being barely 100km from here, its now over 1200km to the first contact point.
That same Russia can barely deal with a Ukraine, that has some spare change backing from the EU. How is again at a war economy? Ukraine, sure, Russia, sure, EU ... nowp.
We now have Northern members that used to be neutral or not part of NATO, that are now part of it.
I feel like people love to misrepresent a lot of history. We have never been in a better position as a EU, vs what we used to be 40, 80, 100 years ago.
Yea, we have a lot of buildup to do again, but lets be honest, i rather see buildup now with modern kit for the modern battles, then relying on outdated 1990's doctrine and weapons. And even that is still a slow process with transitioning to the new reality of drones, drones and drones. Do not forget that 90% of the kills are now by drones.
People love to parrot those US talking point that often have no sense of history and our current EU reality in regards to security. While i admit, that we are still too reliant on US kit, even that is slowly changing. The EU moves slowly but it moves. Better then being some nations that are stuck in Imperialistic ways of thinking, like Russia.
Most everyone would love to see more work on stopping child sexual abuse.
But this is the ultimate "grant me dictatorial powers so I can do good" play.
Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law that suddenly touches everyone even though offenders are a small percentage and should be able to be targeted more efficiently.
Yep, and this is a perfect example of a base rate fallacy situation... even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
Funny you bring this up.
Back in the day when I was like 15 and DC++ was still a thing, I used to browse people's shared folders. One day I came across a file called "the paradox of false positive". It was a 1 pager that described how a machine which is 99.9% accurate at identifying terrorists would be completely useless due to this false positive base rate fallacy you're describing.
It really stuck with me throughout the years. It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.
Which begs the question: lets assume the intentions are pure (which we know they're not but lets be generous), what other options are there when 99.9% heuristic is not good enough? how do you design systems when they're guaranteed to fail as they scale up?
edit: and what do you know, I just saw this as I scrolled down on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816959
The system we got for this is called parenting.
And there is a saying where I grew up: you need a village to raise a kid, I feel like we lost track of that and feel the issues of that now.
Btw, von der leyen is trying to get stuff like this written down as laws since 2009, it got her the nickname Zensursula.
>Btw, von der leyen is trying to get stuff like this written down as laws since 2009, it got her the nickname Zensursula.
And Germans and Europeans looked at that and thought the best place for her is leading the EU?!
Remind me again how she got elected in that position?
Because it seems like the entire EU population knew her being infamous for that, except for the few elites who appointed her there via "democratic process" to the head of the EU.
The president of the European Commission is “elected” through a thin pretence of democracy that the people of Europe have effectively no control over, and mostly pay no attention to. If you think she’s there because the greater public decided she’s the best person for the job then you don’t know how the EU works.
Also most of the EU population don’t know her for anything at all. I’d be surprised if more than 50% of Europeans could name her.
Not a single person that is not attached to EU voted for he. She is second hand vote. These roles should all be result of direct vote. This way you only get votes by people who are sucking the money of Eu parliament or. The only position people vote for is EP. And that % is so small, that if they ask the people who didn't vote if they want it, they would have to tear it down.
I am not against EU cooperation, mainly in external security and free market economy. But the system we have is not very democratic, and def not very representative of people. They act like demigods, elected by parliament with no real consequences of their actions.
These roles should all be result of direct vote.
I disagree. That's an executive power position for an entity that lacks sovereignty. Giving it the legitimacy of direct vote is highly problematic.
Start by giving more power to parliament.
I think you'll find it's the EU member countries that lack sovereignty, not the EU. EU law overrides member state law, not the other way around.
You have to reconsider what "elected" means when it comes to the EU. Certainly not acts of "Germans and Europeans".
> The system we got for this is called parenting
And it fails miserably.
Not really. Yes most kids will see porn before they're 18 but it doesn't damage them or give them the wrong idea about consensual behaviour.
If anything I find GenZ a lot more focused on explicit consent than GenX.
>And it fails miserably.
No it doesn't. That's just needlessly reductionist doomerist take with no argumentation to back that up.
Define failure and success of the system in this context.
It's been working for tens of thousands of years. What changed in the last few decades wasn't parenting or technology. It was the rise of the nanny state where the parents gave up the parenting of their kids and entrusted that to educational institutions instead.
I genuinely think it’s all three:
1. The cultural factor is rising expectations for children and their parents, costing both time and money;
2. The political/social factor is nanny states and academic institutions that the public expects to not only teach but raise their kids;
3. Technology. Especially the Internet, mobile devices, social media, and short form content. Technology distracts and isolates both kids and parents.
An example of the three factors at work is the all-too-common local news trope of ”Nosy neighbor calls CPS because the family next door lets their kids walk to school. Whole family traumatized as a result.”
It both works and fails, like many other things. But if you hold the goal that it must never fail in sufficiently high esteem, you invariably end up with a system like the one we have now.
>the goal that it must never fail
That's a good way to put it
If the goal of a system is to never fail, then the bureaucrats in charge of running that system will just game the metrics and cover up all the issue, while it fails first very slowly then very suddenly.
In fact that's why nothing ever gets done to improve things in the EU/west, because we expect perfect outcome in every new change and we want potential risks to be zero before something new is implemented, so it's easier for leaders to just never do anything, never change anything, just sit and maintain the status quo while we go through managed decline complaining things keep slowly getting worse.
Do you realize you'll end up in fascist dystopia where your children belong to the state, with this line of thinking?
Or is that where you want other people to end up while you peddle propagandist fairytales about failed parenting?
The intuition I've built is that you can't talk about a false positive rate being high or low on its own - it's always relative to the actual occurrence rate of positives in the tested population. E.g. if there's a 1 in 10000 risk of a false positive, but real positives also are only 1 out of 10000 tested cases, then a positive case will have a 50/50 chance of being a false positive (because for every 10000 tests, you'll have on average one false positive and one real positive). So a false positive rate can only be said to be low if it's significantly lower than the real occurrence rate of positives.
The mentioned accuracy in the comment you are replying to already encapsulates the relation of true positives to false positives.
It really doesn’t, and it is easy to demonstrate by using an extreme example.
Suppose I invent a device that can detect whether there is a giant invisible dragon living in your house, and it has an accuracy of 99.999%
Now, I use it in your house and it tells me there is an invisible dragon… so what are the chances that there is a dragon in your house?
Based on your statement, it would be 99.999% likely that there is an invisible dragon in your house. However, we actually know that there is a 0% chance there is an invisible dragon, so even with the positive test result we still know there is a 0% chance a dragon is there.
No I don't believe it does. I interpret 99.9% accurate to mean 1 in 1000 false positives. If 0.1% of your population are terrorists that means each alert has a 50% chance of being correct. That's nowhere near good enough to fully automate things but it is quite reasonable assuming this is merely information provided to a human agent.
Whereas if only 0.001% of your population are terrorists then 99 out of 100 alerts are false positives at which point the system is well on its way to being useless.
There is an important difference between scenarios where we care about the relative versus absolute frequency of errors.
You're right it doesn't. At least not completely. I was thinking about precision (i.e.: if the test is positive, what are the odds that its prediction is true). It turns out, that accuracy is not defined as "true positive / (true pos. + true neg.)", but "correct predictions / all predictions". The whole point of OP's statement: "It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.", which you actually support with your example.
> There is an important difference between scenarios where we care about the relative versus absolute frequency of errors.
The context is chat control without probable cause over the whole population of Europe with a low prevalence. My point, and presumably that of OP, is that even a small relative frequency of errors will yield an unsustainably high absolute frequncy of errors.
> This is merely information provided to a human agent.
It will be in theory. In practice the human agent will just forward the decision. A human agent is not sufficient; you need to test only with probable cause for the kind of scenario we're talking about. The exact opposite of "Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0".
P.S.: The comment I originally replied to choose a very convoluted way of saying that the false discovery rate of the test matters for a proper evaluation. Both you and they explain this by throwing numbers without context in combination with slightly inaccurate definitions. I got the definitions mixed up differently, which led to this follow-up.
I think we largely agree about being opposed to chat control however we seem to disagree somewhat about the underlying reasoning leading us to that conclusion.
> even a small relative frequency of errors will yield an unsustainably high absolute frequncy of errors.
That depends entirely on the rate of true positives in the general population and the rate at which the test successfully catches them. If the success rate is reasonably high and the rate of true positives is within one base ten order of magnitude of the rate of false positives then regardless of volume the stream of reports would be expected to prove quite useful.
To put this in concrete terms, if 1 billion messages are scanned, there are 100 violations, 99 of those violations are successfully detected, and there are an additional 1000 false positives reported, then you've got about a 10% hit rate when examining reports. That would provide a genuinely useful starting point.
But it's not at all clear that we can expect numbers like that. Both because the scanners are likely much worse but also because criminals can't reasonably be expected to stick around on conforming platforms in the event that such measures are enacted.
Even if the reports were 100% accurate I'd still be opposed to it on ideological grounds. I don't think pervasive surveillance of that nature is compatible in the long term with a free and democratic system of government.
> Both you and they explain this by throwing numbers without context in combination with slightly inaccurate definitions.
It was my intent to provide reasoning for all the numbers I put forward. They were meant as examples.
As to definitions I wasn't going by anything formal. I tried to spell out exactly what I meant by each term. Apologies if I wasn't entirely clear about that. Regardless, the precise definitions of the terms aren't what matters here. It's the practical end result - what percentage of the alerts are false?
False result rate is a property of the test. They're describing predictive value, derived from that rate and population statistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_negative_predicti...
Because no one around me understood how to calculate false positive/false negative probabilities, I put together this calculator[1] in 2020.
[1]: https://www.covid2020.icu/false-positive-false-negative-simu...
I thought this was known as Bonferonni'a principle? Or am I getting mixed up?
Bonferonni correction is relevant when you calculate multiple p-values. Most statistical tests are used with a p-value threshold of 5% to reject the null-hypothesis. But because you are repeatedly testing, the probability for false positives increases and that is why you need to decrease the threshold and make it harder, to obtain a p-value below that threshold to declare a significant result.
You typically use the Bonferroni correction when making general statements about a statistical relationship. You wouldn't use it for checking if a particular image shows illegal content. If you kept testing with your image classifier, your significance threshold would need to be continuously lowered and you would asymptotically reach zero.
Relevant XKCD: 882
Google have already caused significant hardship to a father for such kinds of photos. What's particularly galling is how they've continued to maintain they were in the right, despite the police saying no crime had been committed.
https://www.koffellaw.com/blog/google-ai-technology-flags-da...
Of course google and every other big-tech platform is gonna insta-wipe every account containing detected nudes of children, regardless if you're the parent.
The corporate liability of such content being found on their cloud is so insanely nuclear, that they're not gonna wait and ask you "hey are those nudes your own kids or are you a pedo?" before they wipe the account with all pics off their servers.
And yet the will badger you endlessly to the point their photos app is near unusable to turn on auto sync which slurps up every photo and makes it very awkward to then delete them after. To me, this makes Google a liable party even if real CSAM is stored.
> even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.
If the scanner is 99.99% accurate, then most classifications will be correct.
If you scan 1,000,000 pictures (with let's say 10 CSAM), you'll have 100 false positives and 10 true positives, giving you like only 10% correct results
Ah, sorry, I misread what the OP meant by "matches" - thought they were referring to all classifier outputs, while they specifically meant the positives. I changed my original comment to better reflect what I meant, even though that makes it a bit of a non-sequitur now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
How many child abusers do you think there are out there?
Even if 10% of population were actively criminal pedos (which is waaaay too high), its pretty safe to assume that the majority of even their online footprint would be ordinary images/messages.
So a quota of 0.1% or even less material being detectably criminal sounds realistic (probably not much less, though).
I’ve shared this before, I really like this quote:
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."
H.L. Mencken
Mencken just has the best quotes. Here's a few of my favorites:
> The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
> For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
> Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
I have put up a list of all the MEPs who voted for the urgency procedure yesterday (in breach of EU rules) as well as their voting history on fundamental rights issues and who has been lobbying them:
https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chat-control-the-415-who...
Thanks. Please note that your link doesn't work with the tor browser.
I cannot see what is causing the issue, the certificate's full chain is sent, the clock is synced, the cert is showing zero errors in OpenSSL - so this is very confusing.
The irony is, you don't actually need Tor on my site because there is no logging, no third parties, no adtech etc. it is just static HTML files - so whereas I would normally recommend Tor I designed the site specifically to be privacy first.
I will try to figure out what is going on though because obviously I am fully supportive of people protecting their privacy with Tor.
Not sure why, it is working fine everywhere else - I see in Tor it gives an invalid certificate error, but the Lets Encrypt certificate is working fine in other browsers, so seems to be a Tor thing specifically.
I will investigate.
In the list of people that are worried about children.... the government is at the very end.
> Most everyone would love to see more work on stopping child sexual abuse.
By the parents. Install parental controls that only allow to message you and closest relatives. Problem solved.
The bad consequences are diffuse, abstract and distant (conspiracy-looking, tinfoil-like), while it's very easy to viscerally understand that "even if they just save one child, it's already worth it".
They should give precise numbers of how many such crimes are detected via such means or are expected to be detected per year, and how many of those are not possible to catch through regular investigative work. It just seems ridiculously out of proportion especially that with all this flurry around the topic, the criminals surely aren't using WhatsApp for this any more, but especially won't be once the law is adopted. Sure, many are likely stupid but if they are so stupid, won't they fall into other honeypots?
Why are chat apps the best leverage for uncovering this? They'd have to justify this with some sort of data and numbers.
Because later they can just come back and say, well unfortunately they are now all using other means, so now we need to break https,we need to ban e2e, we need to ban vpns, tor and foss operating systems etc etc.
Yeah, and also how many such crimes are actually prosecuted because you know, there is certain island with certain high-ranked people.
Anyways, once that implemented noone will report to you and there will be no means of pushing against it because all your online efforts to coordinate will be compromised.
They should add to those metrics: hours and funds wasted investigating false positives, reputations ruined from false accusations and investigations, decline in public trust, etc.
> Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law
Because narrow law is easier to avoid or find the loophole and a single case is enough to induce panic and anger.
At some point we just have to accept the kids as collateral.
What, like with guns? Never!
CSA makes ppl lose all logic, so is used to justify illogical things.
Reminder that none of this has any evidence that it helps CSA, but nobody cares about the actual children.
I feel like the world cares more about stopping the spread of CSAM than it does the actual abusive actions against children.
We can look to certain world "leaders" for confirmation of that.
It's not the world that's the problem it's the small group of individuals trying to create stasi 2.0, hiding behind the children.
so much for the principle of least privilege..
especially that the guard applying to protect the henhouse seems to have a suspiciously furry tail...
Technology is, furthermore, the wrong place to address child abuse of any kind, sexual or otherwise.
This is like trying to prevent burglary by working with the factory that manufactures pry bars.
> stopping child sexual abuse
> suddenly touches everyone
..............I see what you did there.
> Is scanning mandatory? - No — voluntary.
Voluntary for whom? The service provider? Can I opt out of getting scanned?
> Does it touch encrypted messages? - No. End-to-end encrypted communications were never scanned but providers could deploy client-side scanning under this law.
So it circumvents e2e encryption?
---
How would these laws prevent me from just side loading my own open source client?
> How would these laws prevent me from just side loading my own open source client?
They do not.
You need open hardware and open software at that point and you won't be able to use government identification as they depend on closed source parts of the Android ecosystem. Also you need identification for side loading apps at some point.
Non of these laws stop you from opting out of surveillance, but altogether it gets so hard that at some point you get more suspicious and tracked if you do all this than if you don't do any of these.
Assuming these concerns were real you could just turn the app into a website.
I don't understand. How does it affect encrypted messages? It seems like either you need:
1. allow MITM decryption by a privileged authority
2. require all devices doing E2EE have a non-user-modifiable piece of functionality to scan on-device
The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner? I have to say that I do sometimes think about it while taking a photo of my baby playing in the bathtub - photos like my parents have of me which have been kind of nice to see later. It would be a pity if I had to have a separate analog camera just for baby photos because then I'd need to learn the whole developing film stuff.
> It would be a pity if I had to have a separate analog camera just for baby photos because then I'd need to learn the whole developing film stuff.
Polaroid coming back in business! I would not complain at all if we started reverting some of our lifestyle behaviors back to analog.
Haha, we do have those Instax Mini cameras. They make for a nice dose of nostalgia. We have a big frame full of photos of our friends and family on the wall and it's nice to walk by.
Same. We have albums full of those instax photos
Apple's proposal was only for photos being uploaded to iCloud and not local ones.
IIRC weren't there some thoughts that they'd switch iCloud to E2E but add local scanning on upload (compare to what it currently when Apple, Google, etc. freely scan all your cloud photos anyway). That didn't seem like a terrible deal on paper.
What does "scanning" mean though?
Does this mean every parent has to now make sure not to take pictures of their children playing in bath for instance, in order not to trip these scans for false positives?
>in order not to trip these scans for false positives
They CLAIM they scan for CSAM, so watch out your documents and pictures with something that govt also wants to track.
E2EE on iCloud with advanced data protectiob still keeps metadata not encrypted likely exactly for this purpose.
No. iCloud Photos and Files are and have always been non-e2ee and they already scan everything in it.
Even with e2ee enabled for iCloud Photos/files (which NOBODY uses, and furthermore is entirely disabled in the UK), it sends identifying hashes of plaintext file content to the server without e2ee.
> The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner?
This is exactly what has been proposed. E.g. WhatsApp has a piece of code that scans images and texts before sending. After that, they are "encrypted".
This is of course a massive privacy violation, since the code that scans for CSAM can be switched out to scan for anything else at any time. (It's even easier to do now than when Apple first proposed it, as language models since have gotten good at reading images.)
Apple was already doing image recognition on device for photo searchability when they proposed that solution.
But that did not really carry data out from the device, other than hashes. I think Apply knew this was coming, and tried to do it better.
I am not fully acquainted with the details, but I would not discard (3) make e2ee illegal, at least for platforms of certain size etc. That is what the proponents ultimately want anyway. If they settle for anything else, it's because of the resistance.
This is their actual objective.
Platforms will stop offering E2EE . Didn't Instagram abandon E2EE ?
That is a much more simple prediction. I do use Telegram with our family claw-like and it does not do E2EE by default. You need to do a secret chat or whatever. I think you're probably right. We'll just lose E2EE.
E2EE has UX issues that are difficult to paper over aside from just legislation issues.
You are correct in that both option 1 and 2 are possible. For end-to-end encrypted messages only option 2 is possible. The content will be scanned directly on your own device and the data will be sent to the authorities without your knowledge, if the software detects something suspicious. This is called client-side-scanning.
The proposed Apple system was at least more restrained in that it was looking to identify known abuse images. Which is better than the Google one which aims to identify new unseen content which constantly flags parents acting legally sharing photos to medical professionals.
There are in betweens of an iphone and analog camera. You can use a digital camera with an SD card that you plug into a laptop that never connects to internet.
So the average person is having to set up an air gapped system to store normal family photos while while Epstein's clients and co conspirators communicate over plain text Gmail and for some reason we can't do anything about it.
You aren't that rich, so you are correct.
If so-called "tech" companies are allowed to have control over internet users' communications ("chat control"), where control over communications lies _exclusively with the company, not the user_,^1 then it stands to reason that governments, among others, may influence how that control is exercised
Unlike governments, generally, the companies may use control over communications for any purpose. For example, a surveillance-based advertising services is one purpose that we know about. The companies can collaborate with any party; it may be another another company, it may be a government. The company can utilise surveillance data collected and/or its ability to throttle and censor communications to further any purpose. The parties with whom the company collaborates may potentially use the data for any purpose
Unfortunately for users, the company is not required to disclose with whom it collaborates nor the terms of such collaborations. Hence users have no way to verfiy. Users of these "free services", have few, if any, rights against the company
This situation is preventable. What enables it to exist is user "consent" to ceding control over their private communications ("chat control") to so-called "tech" companies
1. This is accomplished through granting the company total control over the client software, e.g., "automatic updates'. The company effectvely (a) blocks chat participants from using their own client software and (b) forces chat participants to use client software controlled by the so-called 'tech" company. This software is provided for free and primarily serves the company, not the user, advancing the company's commercial interests, e.g., surveillance-based advertising services, at the expense of the user's privacy and security interests
This fact was summarised in a submission that reached the HN front page yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48792203
The same governments pushing for this type of regulation are also the ones that fail to condemn high profile individuals involved in the crimes that these regulation are supposed to help fight. Makes you really wonder if it's about protecting the children.
You make it sound as though this is a proposal for legislation in the US...
There are plenty of friends of that one famous financier roaming the old continent, who probably won't ever see a courtroom or prison cell in their lifetime, despite a lot of incriminating evidence.
It was never about children. They're just using children as political weapons to justify their 1984 panopticon dictatorships.
So many messages about child safety in the press and even here... Who cares about chat control when they already have mind control.
They claim to protect consumers and privacy and then push this creepy surveillance state.
Well it's privacy from private companies. The government still needs to see everything you do just in case. Its not like you have anything to do hide? Do you?
I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
Meanwhile, Governments can take away your freedom, block your right to speech, ruin your entire life, seize your private assets/wealth, take away your children, deport you, etc...all depending on how the cultural wind is blowing on a particular day. And they are legally entitled to hold a gun to your head or kill you if you don't comply.
These are not the same level of risk. Yet more hysterical attention is paid to the former instead of the latter. This is dumb.
Be more worried about governments. Read more history.
> I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
A reminder that governments can buy from private companies. A company like Palantir can buy data from private companies then incorporate it into the software it sells to governments.
Yes and government should not be able to do this.
Exactly. And it is also incredibly short-sided and naive to push for more power for the government when you think it is just going to be used by "your side" for the issues you care about. When you want to wield those powers to promote your own ends against those you oppose, don't be surprised when those you oppose come into power and use those same powers back against you.
Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.
Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.
In general I would agree that say, walmart, is mostly interested in encouraging you to shop at their stores more frequently with the information they gather, it's also true that other corporations are currently selling the information they gather to the government.
And, of course, if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power, in the USA this would include things like state governors / attorneys, federal legislators, presidents, etc, all of whom have some level of influence over my information being collected and used.
If I dislike what walmart is doing, my options are considerably more limited. I can lobby for a law to be passed against it or I can essentially wish for it to go out of business.
> Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.
False dichotomy, they are the same Lernaean Hydra.
> if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power
How has that been going? Did you manage to elect someone, who made a positive change? Let's be charitable - you can pick an example from your life that goes back up to 50 years.
> Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.
No. My point is you should fear centralized power in general, and in exact proportion to the scope of the power being centralized. All power gets abused.
Governments are centralized power on a scale that makes the most powerful corporation on earth look like an ant. Historically AND currently, the worst atrocities come from governments, not companies.
Yet, internet discourse (and new legislation) over the past 10 years has pretended like the biggest threat to us re: data collection is private companies. They are indeed a threat. But they are NOWHERE near the scale of the threat that data collection by governments represents.
This blind spot is part of the reason mass surveillance legislation is being rolled out (largely successfully) everywhere right now.
For example, we've created such a boogieman out of facebook/social media (which, ironically, doesn't even exist anymore as people remember it) that it has manufactured consent among the public for governments building the infrastructure for 1984. A far greater threat to us than micro-targeted face cream ads ever were.
Yeah 'cause we've never had private corporations like Coca Cola or Chiquita Bananas hire paramilitary forces in South America before.
Both large gov't and large corpo are horrible and both should be equally avoided.
So your position is that, because Coca Cola once funded paramilitary action in South America...companies are a worse threat to us than governments?
You don't seem able to hold two ideas in your head.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. Yes, governments can abuse their power.
However, the power wielded by governments is on a whole different scale, so the capacity for abuse and atrocity is exponentially larger (governments have killed millions and can literally destroy the entire world with firepower 100X over).
Wtf are you talking about if NSA PRISM was discovered 10+ years ago which proved all private companies cooperated with govt to spy on you?
You say that govt is holding a gun to citizen's head, but govt also holding a gun at private company's head.
Companies fall under the government. So what a company harvests (to sell more toilet bowl cleaner), is accessible to the government it falls under.
By that logic, you should fear companies at least as much as their governments when handing them your data.
But companies have additional goals: to increase profit. Which can be achieved by selling more toilet bowl cleaner. But also by externalising harm/pollution/costs, monopolising, reducing taxes, etc. All of which harm you, personally.
So, sure, worry about governments. But worry more about (big) companies. Read more history.
Governments have a monopoly on violence, companies generally do not.
This fact alone makes the comparison you’re trying to make pretty silly. You have far, far more to fear from the country from which you’re a citizen than the company for which you’re a customer.
Read more history.
Read Second Amendment.
Also, governments consists of a large amount of human each acting for their own benefit. Assuming they can easily collectively united as a single force to use violence to harm all citizen (on the topic of privacy, it really is the case) suddenly is wild.
On the contrary, for a limited government, it very likely will result in using the monopoly of violence to provide extreme capitalism style IP and private property protection which results in dominating power of large companies. On the other hand, every bit of history demonstrated you can never maintain monopoly of violence if you are really against people.
Monopoly on economic is strong because it can be guarded by violence, while violence cannot be easily guarded by itself within a country (unless AI overlord really comes).
Read more history.
This is actually a fantastic example of the blindspot I'm talking about.
You fundamentally are unable to judge risk correctly due to your political bias.
You're even admitting the risk of companies harvesting data is that it may fall in the hands of governments.
Yet you still think a private company lobbying to reduce taxes is a greater threat than your government wielding enough firepower to kill millions of people and destroy the entire world.
The distinction is very much blurred, and there is much more profitable way to use data than getting people to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
Companies can use it to determine voting patters and sell that to interested political parties. Government are made from political parties and can steer money to those parties, thus the data can now be sold indirectly to the government.
Companies can use it to indirectly target competitors through their customers. Creating a monopoly is much more profitable than just selling more products. Gaining favors with political parties in the above strategy can also help here.
Companies can sell data to governments of other countries. Just because your own government has laws that forbids it, it doesn't mean other countries has the same laws or will treat the citizens of your country as their own. Trade like this can also occur in multiple steps. Company sell data to country A, and country A shares/sells it to your own government. Your own government might finds this preferable to buy it directly as laws may not apply to data shared/bought, even if that data is about their own citizens.
Selling personal data to the government is profitable, but there are also other interested parties. People in legal disputes may want information about the other side, or the juries, or even the judge. Companies that want to do industry espionage would want to buy information about other companies employees. Criminal organizations very much like to buy information about vulnerable people like the elderly. Again, the data doesn't need to be sold directly but can go through many hands until it finally reach the most scummy buyers, and the money will slowly trickle upwards to the seller.
As long as someone collects the data and is willing to sell it to someone, sooner or later it will be sold/leaked to someone who shouldn't have it. That is the fundamental issue with companies collecting personal information.
>I keep trying to explain to people that private companies harvesting your data, while not good, is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
I keep trying to explain to people that any data companies harvest, for whatever purpose, can then be accessed by the government, and that trying to draw distinctions in what is a big massive ouroboros is irrelevant.
Even if you trust the company AND trust the government, the data exists forever, and no one can trust all future governments and all future corporations.
The root issue is still government having absurdly asymmetric power over you.
If the government weren't legally able to use the toilet bowl cleaner companies data against you, it wouldn't matter.
The problem is us giving governments the right to use this data against us (passports to access the internet, messages being under constant surveillance, etc.)
In Europe we're happily handing over our rights every day so that governments have more power over us (supposedly to "protect" us from the big bad evil American tech companies).
Except, Google just wants to make $100/yr off me instead of $50/yr by me voluntarily choosing to use them.
Meanwhile, EU governments want to literally control what I think and feel and do, and take out $100,000 in debt on the backs of each of my children (we're at 115% debt-to-GDP in France) to fund this nightmare surveillance state.
The law can change. Which is why it's better if that data was not collected in the first place.
Plenty of companies collecting data are operated by people who want to control what you think, feel, and do both for profit and based on their owners personal beliefs.
>The Root Issue
Look trying to separate them is foolhardy. Corporations exist due the limitation of corporate liability provided by government. There's no scenario where you have a corporation without government. A corporation will sell you out wholesale to continue having the right to make 100 bucks a year off of people.
> is done solely for the purpose of trying to get you to voluntarily buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
And to steal tips [1], lower your salary [2,3], charge you more [3,4], and limit how you may use "your" property [5]. I'm sure there are many I've missed.
Oh and how could I forget - to smear you if you stand in their way [6].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoorDash#Withholding_of_tips_a... (try doing that when tips are in cash)
[2] https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20260401139/emp...
[3] https://towardsjustice.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Real-S...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/27/nvidia-limits-data-center-us...
[6] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/07/monsanto-fu...
Oh the horror, they might try to lower your salary forcing you to find another competing employer!
Meanwhile governments wield enough power to destroy the entire world 100X over, and are currently shoveling young boys into the meat grinder of war to be slaughtered by the thousands every day.
As a left-leaning forum, HN has a giant blind spot re: government power vs. corporate power. I'm trying to point this out.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. But their power pales in comparison to government power.
> As a left-leaning forum
Even if true it's almost entirely orthogonal.
The "right" is usually only against government control, intervention and surveillance until they get into power. Then they double down on them. Also right wing parties/groups are generally better at controlling and silencing internal opposition (since they are lot better shutting up and falling in line when push comes to shove regardless of their personal beliefs). So they are usually a lot more effective at imposing these things.
I really hope this was /s.
>everyone else is doing it so why miss out the opportunity
You are now finally realizing what a trojan horse is.
You think USA is the Trojan Horse? Barak Obama said, in no uncertain terms, that Europe needed to mobilize and arm itself.
But of course Europe just ignored that warning. Like it anyways has.
At this point I think it's obvious that EU is in turmoil. They're struggling to come to grips with the idea of a Russian invasion on their eastern borders, and simultaneously USA pivoting to Asia and not willing to front their defense after 40+ years of imploring them to do so themselves.
They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.
But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare, and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.
EU has quite successfully decoupled from Russia already, we aren't heavily dependent on Russian energy or other natural resources anymore.
Also, EU countries in Eastern Europe do already have a high military spending, and even Western European countries are improving.
The situation is less than ideal but not hopeless.
> Also, EU countries in Eastern Europe do already have a high military spending, and even Western European countries are improving.
I would really challenge that idea that increasing military spending will create a solid and useful military force.
Most of the money you inject within the military industrial complex is wasted and stolen. At some point it can become counterproductive, we can see it with the US military where recently Iran’s $30k shahed drone destroys $300M US radars.
Note that today's politician never state goals in practical military terms but rather in billions and trillions spent. So they are always victorious. I do not remember Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte or Genghis Khan stating their objectives in terms of money spent.
>I would really challenge that idea that increasing military spending will create a solid and useful military force.
Germany is the EU proof of that. It outpends France at defense spending but its military is massively smaller and less capable, and also non-nuclear to boot. So they're getting a very poor bang for their buck. Mostly because of bureaucracy and corruption are eating most of their money before it gets spent on the troops.
>Most of the money you inject within the military industrial complex is wasted and stolen.
That's why I'm not holding my breath at the whole "German rearmament" propaganda. Most of the money will go to boost the stock of Rheinmetall and friends, not boost the troops.
It's hopeless. Enormous amounts of money is flowing out of Europe into China and the US. Europe has dogshit to offer. You already see it with gdp not growing. Whereas rest of the world did grow. Even Russia has higher GDP growth than Germany. Euro leadership is not smart.
>They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.
The EU is about twice as industrialized as the US is, In the town of Unterlüß of four thousand people Germany produces about half as many artillery shells as the entire US does (and nationally alone now produces more) and Ukraine and Europe have, for the last 18 months, defended Ukraine without about any support from anyone else. Where do you get your information about Europe, on twitter?
Whoa, where do you get your news from - Fox?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
What i found the most fascinating, is that they say its to protect children. But when you look at real child abuse cases, there are huge gaps in sentencing, policing and protecting kids in all countries. Where i live child abuser will get lower sentence than someone who sold weed. There is a lot of real police work that can be done, honey trap pedos on roblox, infiltrate public whatsapp groups to check and monitor for soliciting. Actually listening and responding to child abuse. Work with schools. But this just requires real work. They don't want to do real work. And at the end, it will get thrown out by some senile corrupted judge.
They just want total control.
It's 100% about control - it's the same in the UK.
Last year it was about having to scan your face to verify your age to access porn (to protect the children). They said: It's not about control, it's about protecting children.
Last month the same government announced they will use the same technology to prevent access to Youtube and Twitter without giving over your ID and confirming who you are... Still under the 'protecting the children' banner.
Because of the excessive growing corruption in the EU, their politicians have decided to restrict all opposition. This corruption is hidden behind double-speak, demonization and censorship. Even putting people in prison who talk about the crimes that they endured.
Instead of using the criticism to improve the system, the corrupt system starts to attack and forbid the criticism.
This just says Facebook is allowed to scan for child porn though?
Chat control 1.0
"A temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive that allowed (but did not require) providers to scan private messages of unsuspected users for potential child sexual abuse material."
Does that imply it's currently not allowed?
EDIT: apparently not enforced at least:
"Chat Control 1.0 expires
The legal ground for voluntary, indiscriminate scanning ends. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap state they will continue scanning private messages regardless. "
Yes, the derogation expired on 4 April 2026.
They just voted to reinstate it, and it passed by a narrow majority.
https://howtheyvote.eu/votes/195338
They did id sneakily.
https://www.politico.eu/article/president-vs-parliament-robe...
As I understand it, there will still be another related vote on Thursday, so call your representatives!
This should not be put in the same category as Chat Control 2.0. Doing so severely dilutes the brand Chat Control.
> Does that imply it's currently not allowed?
Not for the last few months, no; Chat Control 1 expired.
How do they scan e2e encrypted messages? Will they force apps/OSes to have master keys/institutional backdoors to have access to the private keys?
They could make all e2ee chats, group chats. Where instead of a 1-1 chat between two people or many-many chat between a lot of people, they do 1-1+1 or many-many+1, where the +1 is the government. Technically the underlaying company or anyone else still won't have access to messages and e2ee won't be "broken", except for the fact that there's one more party in the key exchange.
Or they scan at the edge on the user's device.
Either way, both are very prone to false positives and and very much privacy invading.
I'd be willing to accept this:
Scan on end user's devices, but never transmit the result of that. Only report it ON the device itself to the user. A false positive when you send a pic of your naked kid to your spouse might show a warning icon asking you if you are sure you want to send it.
Also: for minors (Who is a minor not determined by some central age verification, but by me specifying in the Apple/Android family settings who my kids are) you could make sending certain things it blocking or subject to parent approval. E.g. if my daughter is tricked into sending nudes, it's something that's handled the same as if she wants to install an app or visit a specific web page.
No encryption is ever backdoored. Anything beyond this, e.g. reporting any user actions, would be allowed only through a court, just like any wiretapping always was.
Good thinking. Didn't think of that approach. Gonna start sending huge walls of text to DOS them then if this thing lands
> Or they scan at the edge on the user's device.
So then the user can "just" install their own client.
They either just ban E2EE messaging or add a client-side scan of the content before "encrypting" it.
What european parties or people are pushing for chat controls?
People (well, the European Parliament, which is arguably the closest approximation) have clearly and repeatedly opposed Chat Control.
The Commission is an expression of _governments_ (and this one in particular is the result of painstaking compromise) and is only loyal to presidents and prime ministers. It has no accountability to the EP, and it shows.
Conservatives and right-wing. Gives them more control. It‘s a pattern that gets obvious once you see it. It’s so they can hide their own secrets better. In Germany, we have a law that grants you access to information, the "Informationsfreiheitsgesetz“. This was used in the past to uncover morally wrong or illegal behavior, mostly done by the conservative party. This party, as they are currently in charge, is now actively working to change the law, so it's in their benefit.
I’m not familiar with the political landscape in Europe so it may well be mostly people on the right pushing this, but man I wish we could stop framing everything as left vs right.
That framing is distracting us from the authoritarian vs civil liberties issues, which is a dangerous and immediate threat to our ability to have any significant political influence of any kind.
Conservative politicians and leaders as they label themselves and practically act in today's political landscape are fundamentally on the authoritarian and anti-civil liberties side - there is no distraction. The right is only worse in the extent of authoritarianism and destruction of human rights they're willing to go to and the speed at which they want to achieve it.
If a conservative wants to preserve some status quo, basically all policy they use (and have available as a tool) in a permanently changing and developing world (socially, technologically) is that of restrictions, especially on civil rights, and of authoritarian mechanisms like police power. For weird reasons, conservatives never* want to preserve status quo civil rights like workers rights, freedom of information rights and similar that are anti-authoritatian.
There is no “authoritarian left” anywhere in the West, outside of a few vestigial Communist parties with close to zero influence.
This can change in the future, as it has before, but in 2026, even libertarians only care about personal freedom for a certain class of people.
Sadly does not really seems tied to left or right directly.
In Spain (you can see this in the website) our traditional left and right parties are largely in favor, while the parties in both ends of the spectrum (at the lack of better term: far left and far right) seem to be largely against.
The sad thing is that it seems that the parties that are already established or likely to alternative in power are the ones that are pushing for it, and this makes it very difficult to fight against
Interesting - maybe my view is biased. So it's about the people that are in power or more likely to be in power. Hm. Makes sense, thinking about it. Maybe power does, in fact, change your principles.
This again, according to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ for Germany, Chat Contol is generally supported by de-facto left-wing(support immigration, social security, LGBT movement, positive discrimination, progressive tax, worker rights) CDU and CSU (29 of 34 "Yes" votes with 97 votes in total)
pirate parties are usually considered left wing and they all vote against. privacy is a big part of their platform.
there is more than one left wing faction in the eu - we got greens (more radical and oppose chat control), s&d (mainstream parties like german spd, mostly support), the left (hardcore socialist/communists) and renew europe (centrist liberals). none of them are completely united on this.
far right parties are also against chat control most of the time. christian parties (moderate right wing) support it for moral reasons. its really more of a establishment/alternative issue than left/right.
So, ChatControl 1.0 (the volontary, limited one that expired and is being revived) has been active for about 2 years now.
Concretely, are there documented examples of abuses ? Are the checks & balance sufficient ? I understand ChatControl 2.0 goes way beyond, be it goes "beyond" enough that it does not get a majority in parlement, and can't move forward.
But for CC1.0 we don't need to imagine anymore - we have 2 years of application. Is that enough to evaluate ?
I don't understand how Bulgaria supports the idea while most of its representatives are allegedly against it. How does that work?
That's down to how the EU works. These kind of decisions are made in multiple governing bodies. There's the council, which is made up of representatives from member states governments and the parliament, which is made up of directly elected MEPs.
The national government of Bulgaria's position isn't necessarily in line with Bulgarian MEPs.
Things like this is why I no longer support the EU at all.
Age verification for 'appstores' (debian repos?) is inside ChatControl v2.
> Supreme Court allows Texas to require age verification for mobile apps
So, I blinked and forgot to check for updates on this and they voted a few hours ago to reinstate this... https://www.heise.de/en/news/Showdown-in-Strasbourg-The-unex...
This website is gold, thanks for all the work.
EU politicians spend more time on chat control than on the reopening of Hormuz or EU energy security. It is a complete joke.
> EU politicians spend more time on chat control than on the reopening of Hormuz
I thought I'd heard it all here on HN, but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.
> US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.
We aren't done yet. Game on after the midterms.
The US is now getting money from every ship passing the street. How people not see that for the US the world is a game of command and conquer. They rule everything and if it's not ruled it gets bombed.
>but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot
Please don't pretend to misunderstand a point just to manufacture the opportunity to reply in bad faith.
Nobody in EU is saying the EU should clean up others' mess around the world, people are just saying the EU should be busy building domestic capacity and capabilities to insulate itself from the issues caused by others around the world, such as securing domestic energy supplies so that the next time USrael blows up the middle east, the EU can just eat it no issue indead of being at the mercy of foreign oligarchs for overpriced energy.
US is so monetary rich and energy rich that they can afford to blow up the middle east every 10 years with little domestic consequences for them, and still have enough gas to drive their Ford F-450s Super Duty to Walmart, heat their pools and AC their homes, without leading to national unrest, but EU is so energy starved that securing energy independence should have been a national security issue for the past 20 years already, not since 2022.
And not just energy, EU is exposed in other areas as well (SW, AI, semiconductors, lithium batteries, agriculture, manufacturing, defense, etc), and again, it will only wake up in panic mode at the 11th hour when US or China twists their arm in some spontaneous international dispute. But politicians instead of focusing on preemptively securing these vulnerabilities BEFORE shit hits the fan, are too busy focusing on controlling people's privacy, which is what EU citizens and commenters here are criticizing.
> people are just saying the EU should be busy building domestic capacity and capabilities to insulate itself from the issues caused by others around the world
If this is what you wanted to have said, say that from the beginning instead of leaving some vague and ambiguous "general complaint about the Strait of Hormuz" and maybe others like me will understand you better.
Somehow you seem to imply none of those things are happening right now in Europe, is this really your perspective? You think no one is thinking about domestic energy supplies? Do you not understand how EU works? Lots of things are happening in parallel, not the least a lot of work around energy dependency and other core infrastructure issues.
>Somehow you seem to imply none of those things are happening right now in Europe, is this really your perspective? You think no one is thinking about domestic energy supplies? Do you not understand how EU works? Lots of things are happening in parallel, not the least a lot of work around energy dependency and other core infrastructure issues.
"The purpose of a system is what it does". So far there's no sign of any progress, it's just getting worse. The Draghi report was two years ago and nothing has been done to address the issues it raised.
> Nobody in EU is saying the EU should clean up others' mess around the world
That's literally what the top poster said.
Your points make sense, "EU should reopen Hormuz" is laughable
> is laughable
Exactly, that's why it was obvious he was speaking implicitly.
And well... EU will have to clean up others mess that they sprayed all over Europe anyway.
Either the EU opens Hormuz or the EU pays twice the pre war rate for gas / oil indefinitely. Of course at least they can put the subjects that bitch about it in jail now.
Like a lot of the rest of the world they would probably rather take the alternative option and accelerate the transition to clean energy. Has the upside of not handing more power to an authoritarian state on the other side of the Atlantic that clearly hates them and routinely threatens them.
Well everyone pays the same for oil (unless there are export/import control and adjusted by transportation costs) worldwide.
So americans will be paying 2x as well its just that some of that money will stay in the country instead of going to the middle easter or US (which happens to be the largest supplier of oil to the EU)
Back in 2025 EU imported ~15% from the gulf. China was over 40% and Japan at 95%...
how is EU supposed to open hormuz? do you expect them to raise armies and go to war over a shipping lane? I think US demonstrated plenty enough this is not a viable strategy (this was known for the past 50 years)
One thing the EU might do is put some pressure on Israel to stop breaking the cease fire and just generally to stop bombing everybody.
It's unlikely to happen, but that's the one thing I can see that the EU could contribute to the opening of Hormuz.
yes that's what's known for the past million years, if you hurt people they stop bothering you and do what you want
What shows up in your news feed and what the politicians are spending time on are wildly different things.
Would've been so much better to reduce the scope of your comment to just energy security.
I don't see how the EU lived live with already higher energy prices compared to the US for so long and still don't make better renewable policy top priority.
They do have us in their power. They don't have Iran under the same power.
When it comes to online actions people ask for way more than reasonable. You dont get to be an invisible, impossible to track, unaccountable hacker man free to roam the internet on equal footing to the rest of the users.
Who's arguing for that? And why is it not "reasonable" to ask for basic privacy?
This is a strawman argument. Almost no one who wants to preserve their right to free and open communication without government knowledge or interference, wants that so that they can hack.
It’s not about catching hackers or child predators, it’s about government control.
Lobbyists control the EU. So much is clear to everyone now.
I think there is no way to fix this system from the inside - it is designed to be abused like that. We need an alternative system.
Even if there was no lobbying or corruption, the EU is structurally flawed: the Council, which is made up of 27 mandates that were given for local politics, is used by nations to launder their domestically unpopular laws through an EU indirection layer, the Commission has no electoral link (VDL was appointed, when afaik the Parliament should nominate a Commission President), the Parliament, the legislative body, has no legislative initiative, and despite rejecting laws drafted by the Commission, as we've seen, those laws can be forced through indefinitely until the Commission gets the rubber stamp it needs.
i think a good general rule is anyone with ultimate power over some area (president, lawmakers, supreme court judges) should be elected. thats anyone whos decisions cant be reversed by someone else above them. those who make final but reversible decisions (pm, ministers, heads of military and intelligence) should be directly appointed by someone who was elected. if you allow indirect appointments to important positions you get a corrupt undemocratic government.
As a EU citizen I’m at a loss for what to do about this. I feel that they’re going against any average citizen’s interest. What can we do to make them stop?
Short-term, follow the steps on the website and contact your political representative to explain to them why it's such a bad idea.
Long-term, switch to another messenger app that's opensource and truly E2E encrypted.
That also shows why this is such a foolish proposal.
The truly scary people are not on the "consumer" chat apps anyway and most certainly will be the first ones to switch to another communication channel if this passes. If this will have any effect it'll be that some, "dumb" criminals will be caught.
Use the submission form on the site to email your representatives.
Vote for parties that oppose this nonsense. In the meantime, install Linux on your desktop/laptop, and a free Android variant on a compatible phone. Use Signal, and urge your family and friends to do the same.
The irony is that those questions can only be legally questioned when they're approved (and sometimes have a defined implementation)
Then there's the whole kerfuffle about how to actually implement this
So the thing that comforts me is that it's a dumpster fire all the way down and I'm sure there will be plenty of legal complaints about it
Related today:
Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819008
Anyone know how Signal is responding to this? They ARE E2EE.
Their stance is of non-compliance and leaving EU market if Chat Control 2 get into law.
https://aboutsignal.com/news/the-end-of-private-conversation...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM:2022...
It's funny they thing criminals are using those platforms for discussion
Funny you think they think that. They just want control.
Would these measures have prevented, for instance, the generalized Rape Gangs they had in the UK and that were hidden by the authorities to keep some weird idea of social peace?
To everyone who wants to dismantle the EU: this is not the solution. Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies. The UK left the EU and implemented its own version of chat control - Online Safety Act - without any transparency or real opposition. The right solution is the political fight. Europe is our home. We must keep it in good shape by getting rid of anything that makes it worse - like Chat Control.
Look at this other piece in the frontpage:
> Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera (allaboutcookies.org)
the eu should never have been born. The above are its results - and just an example. How do we fix that disaster?
And the US wanted to install a breathalyzer in every car a few years back. How is this supposed to prove anything?
That was a law in France from 2012 to 2020 too (breathalyzer needs to be on board). It was not on European level and it has been removed.
That offensive law (every car owner must keep a breathalizer item in the vehicle ready for use) was famous in the "issued but not enforced" category.
But the mandate to keep "equipment" in the car is very different from kill-switches depending on sensors and embedded in electronics - the poster seems to have meant this.
> [they] wanted
Did they? That makes a good amount of difference, you know. Especially when "they" may be a vocal exception.
> How is this supposed to prove anything
Prove what. Nothing seems to be disproven.
Edit: look, if you were trying to negate a "bad A" through an "(also) bad B", review and revise your logic. Which is important because that non-argument has been exploited to bend the political opinion of street-rubes to CEO-rubes for the past few years ("Bad Springfield hence [...] not bad Vernapool").
> Did they?
Look, this was a headline I recalled seeing in the news. I do not live in the US, and honestly I'm kinda tired of hearing as much about your (?) politics. If I hadn't used the uncertainty qualifier, I would have been lying.
That said, I believe it did pass almost unanimously, coming into effect in 2027 or something. The law in question required all cars come equipped with intoxication detection systems and refuse to start failing that check.
> vocal exception
I'm not from there, yet even I can tell the system is as broken as it could be. There are two parties funded by almost the same oligarchs, one advocating for open fascism and the other aimlessly laundering elite interests in nominal progressivism, while being more concerned with exterminating actual leftists within than tackling their opposition. You've steadily passed age verification in most major states, followed by a bipartisan federal bill.
Your system does the same thing as EU-steadily laundering corporate agenda into legislation. At least in most of the EU, this shared disease hasn't progressed into the stage of eroding so much of workers rights and basic environmental protections. But with the recent populist currents, I can imagine the median voter will vote for their starvation if only to spite the brown people.
> Bad Springfield hence not bad Vernapool
The argument that started this thread was that the EU itself needs to be entirely abolished because it produces laws of this nature.
If you apply that same standard, do you think cessation is what the US states should do too? Well, these same laws easily pass into state legislation too. All you'd be doing is delaying the inevitable, if you don't cut the problem at its root.
by educating our fellow co-citizens about who to vote for. This is not an issue of the EU, but about the politicians in power and them caving in on lobbyists from economy side and fascists
That translates to "capillary education, to the point of fixing structural systemic issues", measure needed generations ago.
We have damages now. The car systems destroyed. How would we be able to fix that, to revert from that and the rest of the damages - which they are carrying on perpetrating as we speak, inventing new.
This is not any more a matter of prevention, it is a matter of fixing the past and preventing the future predictable damages.
The EU is beyond reform, this law targets exactly this: nascent political projects that threaten the status quo.
I believe that the EU will cause so much strife that the long peace we've enjoyed on the continent will be brought to an end, not because of the EU, but because of the wedges drawn between pro-EU and EU-skeptic countries.
Of course Americans want us to dismantle the EU, we are even weaker against US influence without it.
Isn't the EU rather like a single point of failure?
No, every country remains sovereign. Hungary's previous regime ignored the EU for over a decade. Many countries are instituting border controls again despite the Schengen agreement.
These are the biggest issues in the EU. You make it sound like a positive thing. These countries erode the trust in law and exploit the subsidies.
I was a big EU federalist but now it seems just a tool for liberal authoritarianism pushed by the established parties.
>Europe is our home.
At the same time parts of my country feel less and less like home if at all and those politicians really hate adressing it.
>Dismantling the EU is like burning down your own house just to get rid of flies.
I don't like this comparison at all. Europe, the land that housed, fed and scarified my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called the EU that does not represent me nor speak in my name.
Empires, monarchies, governments and all such man-made institutions like the EU get torn down all time, when they become too bloated, incompetent, corrupt and cronyistic and lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people. See all human history.
Forests go through prescribed burns in order to be saved, for their own good, and so must political institutions. And when the rot is too big, it can't simply be "patched" anymore, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch with fresh new people, which in turn will get corrupted over time and get torn down, and so on, rinse and repeat because that's human nature.
Ironically, the EU has achieved its goal of uniting all Europeans, as in they're all now united via hating what the EU has become and what it's doing.
Let's stop the blut and soil BS right here. I am all for european panationalism but don't pretend that Europe is "your house" where "your ancestors" were. You come from a very specific culture inside it which has its own specific language and traditions and that has spent most its history warring with its neighbours, sometimes people in the next village speaking a different version of your lanuage. My ancestors and your ancestor probably scarified each other, the land didn't
Turns out unifying a lot of different countries that have different languages and interest is a hard problem and in order to satisfy everyone a little bureaucracy is the price to pay. You may find it too bloated, too slow or even too corrupt but burning it to the ground is a lunacy for people who entertain clean slate delusions: Whenever it happens, it is a catastrophy for everyone but a few opportunists.
Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement. Now it can stay an economic union and big powers can pick and choose how to manipulate each one of us for their own purposes or it can strive to be a political union and have a standing on the international stage. We're not there yet but we will, eventually, we just need to hang tight. Things take time.
>Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement.
Not really. South American countries don't go to war with each other and they don't have a union. Nor do central American countries.
> South American countries don't go to war with each other
No? Here are some examples I found:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian%E2%80%93Bolivian_War_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peruvian%E2%80%93Bolivian_War_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_War
You may argue these were all in the 19th century, and that is true. It's possible South America learned their lesson from the world wars. An alternative explanation is the presence of the US. It was never going to let another regional power roll up smaller states in the Western hemisphere so there was no point in being expansionist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paquisha_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenepa_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_conflict
And that's not counting the Falklands war because Britain doesn't feel like it belong in the neighborhood but it's still an invasion of sovereign territory out of nationalistic motives
I'll grant none of those was a major conflict and that it's an interesting case but still. Maybe the fact that apart from Brazil, they have a language in common makes it harder to sell the neighbour as a foreigner ? What else could it be ? I am genuinely curious
It does get tense sometimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_War
>Let's stop the blut and soil BS
do you feel the same way when Africans speak of Africa?
I think less because I am not an african myself but yes, I guess it could ?
Can you provide me with some example of something that you think I would not disapprove of and that amounts the exactly the same thing ?
Or maybe can you try to defend the blood and soil rethoric (call it the way you want) instead of a drive-by comment ?
I'm just noticing that only European people seem to be disallowed from calling their land "their land" and outsiders "outsiders". it's "blut and soil", as if the men who fought Nazis fought Nazis for some high-minded ideals rather than their land and their people.
Oh, you're just noticing are you ? Who are those people who are "disallowing" you from calling your land your land ? How do you handle living under such oppression ?
Just come out of the woods will you
It turns out people don't like to be invaded, yes, simple as. Of course you would very much like to convince everyone that immigration is just the same as an invasion and thus, the same way to deal with it is justified. So just say so instead of dancing around and posing as the victim.
>Let's stop the blut and soil BS
>Who are those people who are "disallowing" you from calling your land your land ?
Ok, so pushback is the same as being disallowed, got it. No wonder you people have such a victim complex.
Well yes, I do not hesitate to say that this stuff is senseless and terrible:
> Nigeria says 2 nationals were killed during anti-migrant violence in South Africa
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/nigeria-ghana-malawi-fore...
> ‘Leave or return in a coffin’: The threat driving migrants out of South Africa
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/29/africa/south-africa-anti-...
>Let's stop the blut and soil BS right here
Would you also tell that to native American Indians? Or to the Japanese? Or to the Indians?
It's no BS unless you've been brainwashed and make massive efforts to ignore reality. Blood based belonging to a place is hardwired in every culture and society on the planet, from Asia to the Americas. NA, UK, AU, NZ, and the EU just have added a lot of PR paint on top to pretend it doesn't exist in their liberal societies, but it does, except it's much more under the table and subversive.
>a little bureaucracy is the price to pay.
Taking away people's privacy and freedom of speech is a little more problematic than just "a little bureaucracy".
>Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement.
That WAS an achievement in the past, but if you dissolve the EU institution tomorrow, no former EU member state will suddenly got to war with their neighbour just because the EU doesn't exist anymore. So the myth that the EU is somehow preventing war in EU today is bogus. That was history, this is today.
> Would you also tell that to native American Indians? Or to the Japanese? Or to the Indians?
If they were saying to me what you wrote that $big_chunk_of_land "is the land that housed, fed and scarified my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called" $state_institution, I would laugh them off, yes
> Taking away people's privacy and freedom of speech is a little more problematic than just "a little bureaucracy"
I mean yes but it is ultimately your framing. It's concerning and worth being fought against but no worse that what US was, is or has tried to do, and despite the corrupt buffoon at its head right now, it is not a dictatorship yet. What we need is a good balance of powers and well-designed institutions, and not as you suggested, to destroy it.
> That WAS an achievement in the past, but if you dissolve the EU institution tomorrow, no former EU member state will suddenly got to war with their neighbour just because the EU doesn't exist anymore. So the myth that the EU is preventing war in EU is bogus. That was history, this is today.
Fair enough but that does not warrant the use of the past, it IS an achievement. Also, give it time and history will do its thing. Remove the EU and, sooner or later, war will come back. The same way that if you remove the counter-powers, tyranny will come back
EDIT: You added this part about in response to my blood and soil line afterwards:
> It's no BS unless you've been brainwashed and make massive efforts to ignore reality. Blood based tribalism and ingroup preference is hardwired in every culture and society on the planet, from Asia to the Americas. NA, UK, AU, NZ, and the EU just have added a lot of PR paint on top to pretend it doesn't exist in their liberal societies, but it does except it's much more under the table and subversive.
Interesting how people seem to think reality is on their side and people who think otherwise must have been brainwashed.
Anyways, is it hardwired or is it "soft" wired ? Are we only responding to our wiring or did we manage to create cultures around it or are we condemned to an endless loop of prewired behaviours ?
Sexual desire is also "hardwired" in us and yet we finally managed to no rape each other based on dominance hierarchies. Is that the kind of society you are looking forward to ? One based on some kind of supposedly natural order ?
Yes tribalism does exist, we know what kind of world it produces. It's utter shit. Poverty and misery for everyone but the people at the top.
I swear you people are so bored that you cannot appreciate the sheer amount of material wealth you are effing bathing in. You dream of an heroic past that never existed where you get to be the hero.
Ha the times where being a man with no other skills than violence could get you riches ! Let's conveniently forget about most people, living under the boot in a life of injustice and life-threatening poverty.
>I mean yes
QED. End of story. Rest is just meaningless ranting that doesn't disprove anything I said before.
Amazing, you even support autarky in debating
I agree on the base of the argument. EU after all was created because of one tragedy. I'm absolutely sure that there will be more gruesome wars on the continent and I even wouldn't rule out the collapse in the future because petty tribalism holding everything back as always.
But this is the hatred you are talking about?
https://www.politico.eu/article/europeans-embrace-eu-gloom-w...
"Eurobarometer by the EU shows Europeans love the EU"
seems legit lol
Probably because most Europeans are clueless and brainwashed by MSM pro-EU propaganda, and never hear about the nasty things the EU tries to do like chat control, age-ID, car surveillance, or taxing parcels.
To most Europeans EU just means going to Spain on vacation and going to work in Germany for more money, anything else stupid the EU does never reaches them directly until much later when the second order effects hit but then it must be because the fault of Putin or Trump.
Most Europeans are pretty detached from EU politics. If you ask them who their EU MEPs /representative are most have no clue without googling, they just know some of the ones in their own country, but EU politics might as well be on another planet.
>"Eurobarometer by the EU shows Europeans love the EU"
seems legit lol
Probably because most Europeans are clueless and brainwashed by MSM pro-EU propaganda, and never hear about the nasty things the EU tries to do like chat control, age-ID, car surveillance, or taxing parcels.
So which is it?
Are the stats fake, or are Europeans actually saying this because they are brainwashed?
Because you are trying to have both. First, official EU polling is illegitimate propaganda. Then, in the next breath, you explain why Europeans really do support the EU. That means the poll is not fake. You just hate the answer.
Every result you dislike is fake, and every person who disagrees with you is brainwashed. Very brave epistemology.
Exactly. This is ridiculous behavior. Simple solutions for complex problems are usually the wrong ones.
One griefer which promised prosperit fueled Brexit, which caused Britain visible stagnation and now he is a candidate for MP promising to fixing it all yet again.
I need to repeat, that Simple solutions for complex problems usually do not work.
the eu has always been an instrument of american imperialism. leader like ursula was casted away of german politics for corruption and most of the other big names had ties to american companies like goldman sachs or’other financial institution. the eu is a prison for all of us. for a moment germany thought they could use it as an instrument to win and crush its biggest competitors (france and uk) but now they dont have an energy sector (lost thanks to their dear american friend bombing nordstream and foreign countries financing an anti nuclear narrative) and as such they now also lost the heart of their economy : their industry. the final nail in the coffin is spain opening the gates to millions of mens from less developed countries while major european economies have record youth unemployment.
its a crime against what was not so long ago some of the greatest nations on earth. now were as citizen are living under a distopia of urss with the worst of capitalism combined with the worst of communism. mass surveillance, removal of all personal freedom (freedom of speech, right to own property and cars, right to inherit, right to have a nation for our people, harshnpunishment for any contestation’up to jail timz for memes while at the same time very lenient justice toward murderers, rapists and other criminals.)
we gave away our right to exist and be nations and we did that without even a fight
you seem to be from Russia. You do realize it's not in the EU right?
russia was indeed the ones who pushed germany to be reliant on their energy instead of going for nuclear. they funded green party to do that. and germany on their side then voted laws and pushed eu to remove nuclear from green energies list so that france wouldnt have an edge against germany shooting themselves in the foot
Just think "neighborhood", no? This seems like splitting hairs... And to what end? to take a shot at EU supra-national structure? ("What, you don't ally to your country?" kinda shade.)
-- Canadian
more like an increasingly authoritative and retarded HoA.
... which you have no obligation to follow the rules of
Maybe “your own city” would be a more precise metaphor than “your own house”. Your country is your house, but the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
The concept of a modern nation is also relatively new. It emerged as an identity for groups of people who were no longer defined mainly by the monarchs ruling over them. That identity replaced the king as the symbol of belonging.
But now nationalism is often doing the opposite. Instead of freeing people from old power structures, it is holding Europe back.
So yes, maybe it is not literally “your house”, but the point still stands. Burning down the city around your house is not exactly a smart move either.
>the EU is the city around it, with the roads, infrastructure, shared rules, market, security, and institutions that make the house function.
If you measure "function" by the relative economic and military power of the country, then the EU has overwhelmingly degraded the function of its initial members compared to when they joined.
> If you measure "function" by the relative economic and military power of the country, then the EU has overwhelmingly degraded the function of its initial members compared to when they joined.
Very sure that when the EU was still in its infancy, we had only "west Europe" in arms, vs a USSR (aka all the eastern states and Russia). Now all those states are part of NATO and the EU.
Instead of the border to the closest hostile nation (Russia) being barely 100km from here, its now over 1200km to the first contact point.
That same Russia can barely deal with a Ukraine, that has some spare change backing from the EU. How is again at a war economy? Ukraine, sure, Russia, sure, EU ... nowp.
We now have Northern members that used to be neutral or not part of NATO, that are now part of it.
I feel like people love to misrepresent a lot of history. We have never been in a better position as a EU, vs what we used to be 40, 80, 100 years ago.
Yea, we have a lot of buildup to do again, but lets be honest, i rather see buildup now with modern kit for the modern battles, then relying on outdated 1990's doctrine and weapons. And even that is still a slow process with transitioning to the new reality of drones, drones and drones. Do not forget that 90% of the kills are now by drones.
People love to parrot those US talking point that often have no sense of history and our current EU reality in regards to security. While i admit, that we are still too reliant on US kit, even that is slowly changing. The EU moves slowly but it moves. Better then being some nations that are stuck in Imperialistic ways of thinking, like Russia.
Charlatans and demagogues.
How many child abusers are liable to be detected using platforms that are known to report you when you can google (or chatGPT) how to avoid detection?
Wake me up in 100 years and ask me what EU politicians are doing.
My answer: regulating something:)
Why do these Epsteinist Occupied Governments think they'll get away with this unscathed. These demons are addicted to destroying freedom.