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Comment by mayoi | Hacker News Reader

No need to be so rude.

From the law enforcement side, that is the system working as it should - the police investigated and cleared him of any wrongdoing.

That Google can close someone's account for any reason and without any recourse is a wider issue, and one separate to this EU regulation.

Give me access to yours and your childrens' phones, I suspect that you or one of them may be a pedophile. Don't want to? Too bad, here is the law that says that I can get it all anyway. Don't worry, I'm a good programmer, I won't see it myself, I'll let one of my algorithms do it for me (I can't tell you how it works though, since you may use that information to hide something from me)! I pinky promise that neither I nor the other strangers viewing your or your childrens photos are pedophiles!

Is that the world you want to live in?

Why should everyone suddenly have to trust the discretion of complete strangers?

Yes that sounds fine to me. We have specially trained police in this category of crimes, for good reason. I trust them to investigate fairly and proportionately.

If we cast aside the hyperbole and look at the actual details of what is being proposed in this regulation, it's clear they're taking a decent and reasonable approach here.

And you think that the potential capture of a few criminals outweighs the violation of privacy of communications of 450 million humans?

You'd be okay with forcing this onto people who don't want this, and the majority who won't even know that this is happening?

Yes, he'd be okay with it, he has nothing to hide after all, not even the fact that his phone got stolen and was used to send bomb threats to 30 nearest hospitals, then destroyed, in the area where he lives with court ruling that he's guilty + getting extra time for destroying all evidence. Literally NOONE would ever do such a thing, it's not like criminals already communicate using stolen devices and even buy things using stolen credit cards. There's simply NO WAY.

If my phone got stolen, the police would be investigating the person who stole it. Inventing outlandish scenarios isn't really a good argument here.

I don't agree that having a CSAM detection algorithm running in your messaging client is a violation of privacy.

If it detects something and alerts the relevant authorities, there will then be a proportional reduction of privacy while they investigate, but this is true of any criminal investigation.

Doing it this way strikes a reasonable balance. Other alternatives include doing nothing at all, or sending a copy of all private communications to a third party - neither of which are desirable.

Do you not feel that your devices should wholly act in your interest, instead of possibly falsely accusing you of crimes? Would you want to have your devices and the state spying on you in a way that you can't introspect or control? Or unable to oppose, should its usage be extended to other domains? What about the presumption of innocence?

Why trust the executive without judicial oversight? What if they use their powers illegally, or misuse the files they receive? What if they are hacked? You will never know what happens in the black box.

> I trust them to investigate fairly and proportionately.

Should we trust authorities with unlimited power because... you said so? (no snark intended)

The last 2000 years of history show it's not a good idea. Prove me wrong.

It's not unlimited power, this is a specific power for a specific scenario - detection of probable CSAM in a person's messages.

That's very much unlimited power to breach privacy.

Please hand over all of your account details now them. Just so we can all check.

Law enforcement acknowledging the fact that he did nothing wrong won't fix the fact that he lost a lot of time and probably braincells because of the stress induced by something completely retarded that should've never happened.

Now go ahead and send a SWAT team to my house, because I have a real photo of a naked baby in an album in one of my coffers, lets ignore for a moment that it was taken by my mother when I was a baby, and I guess by your standards, it's called "CSAM" or something equally retarded.

So literally Google unilaterally decided, based on a "suspicion" that any human being would have immediately found to be bogus, to forward _all_ of his private, personal photos to the authorities, and you think that here "the system is working as it should"? What type of expectation of privacy can you have under this system ?

> and one separate to this EU regulation.

no, not separated at all

laws have to take the implicit effects they have into account they could have added a clause to require providers to not close the account until the police investigation finishes. They didn't. Which means they are implicitly partial responsible for such abuse.

That is a broader consumer rights issue which, I agree, the EU should do something about too.

But adding a clause to this regulation would not solve that wider problem.

yes, but it would make this law less worse

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