>If passed, the legislation would require encrypted app makers ... to find ways to enforce such scanning – something they have neither the ability nor the desire to do.
100% they could add client side scanning, why do they think its impossible?
100% they could add client side scanning, why do they think its impossible?
>100% they could add client side scanning, why do they think its impossible?
I think you've misread that sentence. It's saying that they don't have the ability right now, as-in this is not a feature they've written in their software, and that further they do not wish to do so (in the same way that Apple did not want to write a backdoor for the FBI previously). Obviously as a matter of programming of course backdoors can be written and have been. But software developers don't want to be forced at gun point to do so like the EU proposes, which seems perfectly understandable.
And fwiw with open source software it actually would be arguable that they "don't have the ability" on a more technical level since that couldn't actually be enforced on the users and the EU's jurisdiction ends at its borders. Obviously many of the most popular messengers are proprietary, but not all. And even for the proprietary vendors that probably does factor into their arguments, as it'd put them at a commercial disadvantage.
All you need to do to avoid it would be to encrypt outside the app, something most people would not bother to do, but criminals would be motivated to do.
2. Reliable client-side scanning of images is impossible (you cannot download illegal content to client devices for exact matches, so it will be only signatures and collisions are possible), so there will be false positives that will be reported, which will inevitably result in violation of privacy, possibly persecution etc.
2. You mean "Reliable classification of client-side scanned images is impossible", although you dont actually define reliable. This is besides the point, Im not talking about the actually feasibility of this on a political level, Im asserting a specific technical point that client-side scanning is 100% possible for e2e apps
I don't understand why someone would go through the trouble of using WhatApp to pass around separately-encrypted files instead of using anything else, though.
2. It's also "technically possible" to do the scanning server-side, on the encrypted stream, and flag anything that by chance matches a known hash.
The only acceptable scanning process here is the one that produces only true positives, no collateral damage. This is what I call reliable.
well then reliability is impossible, you must accept errors
Nobody should accept errors. Client-side scanning simply must not happen. It’s mathematically dumb idea.
BTW the hash is a CRC32 one
Oh they do. They are excempted.