Comment by blaze33 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blaze33 | Hacker News Reader

I regularly see similar articles with similar comments here, but there's one thing I still don't understand:

From the European Convention on Human Rights[1]:

  ARTICLE 8
  Right to respect for private and family life
  
  1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family
  life, his home and his correspondence.
  
  2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the
  exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the
  law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of
  national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the
  country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection
  of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms
  of others.

So I wonder, what is the legal argument solid enough to justify interfering with everybody's right to privacy?

My layman understanding of the usual process is like, we want surveillance over those people and if it seems reasonable a judge might say ok but for a limited time. Watching everyone's communications also seems at odds with the principle of proportionality[2].

[1]https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/Convention_ENG

[2]https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:12...

> what is the legal argument solid enough to justify interfering with everybody's right to privacy?

"... except such as is in accordance with the law"

And the "interfering" coming from ChatControl is that "some algorithm" locally scans and detects illegal material, and doesn't do anything if there is no illegal material.

> Watching everyone's communications also seems at odds with the principle of proportionality

It's a bit delicate here because one can argue it's not "watching everyone's communications". The scanning is done locally. Nobody would say that your OS is "watching your communications", right? Even though the OS has to "read" your messages in order to print them on your screen.

Note that I am against ChatControl. My problem with it is that the list of illegal material (or the "weights" of the model deciding what is illegal) cannot be audited easily (it won't be published as it is illegal material) and can be abused by whoever has control over it.

> Nobody would say that your OS is "watching your communications", right?

No what? Everyone has been hating on the spying Microsoft has been doing in windows for years. How do you ask this with a straight face.

That's not what I meant.

Would you say that a minimal install of Linux or *BSD is "watching your communications"? It has to "read" your data in order to show them to you, but you wouldn't count this as "watching communications" or "surveillance". Siri running locally is not considered "surveillance".

The problem is when your data is exfiltrated, which is what you complain about with your Microsoft example. But again that's not what I meant.

It’s not what you meant but it’s what you said. I understand what you meant, but others might not. Many people think their phones/computers are watching their communications. This was in response to your ‘Nobody would say that your OS is "watching your communications", right?’, which I cannot agree with as everybody I know says those exact words about android/windows/etc.

> It’s not what you meant but it’s what you said.

Technically, I did not say it, I wrote it. Normally, the way it works is that you don't take a single sentence out of its context and then say it's wrong. You take the context.

I specified my thought in the next sentence:

> Even though the OS has to "read" your messages in order to print them on your screen.

Nobody would say that the OS is watching your communications, even though the OS has to "read" your messages to print them on your screen.

I understand but frankly "doesn't do anything if there is no illegal material" reminds me too much of the old anti-privacy argument "nothing to hide, nothing to fear".

It is about control and purpose, "my OS watches my communications" is true but weird to say because there's an expectation, unless compromised, that the OS is under my control so no problem. A third-party controlling the local scan of all my data specifically to report whatever it wants is a huge problem.

Too often are some specific issues left insufficiently addressed for too long and it seems like the answer ends up like, ok we give up, here's some collective punishment, that should do the trick.

> A third-party controlling the local scan of all my data specifically to report whatever it wants is a huge problem.

And that is exactly my point: you fundamentally can't audit what ChatControl is doing, because you don't have access to the "list of illegal material" (precisely because it is illegal). So whoever controls that list could abuse it.

I see lot of weird arguments like "it's breaking encryption" and "it's destroying democracies". It's wrong. The problem is that it may be abused if your democracy doesn't work as well as it should. And it's good enough an argument to be against ChatControl.

My whole point is that it's not constructive to throw baseless complaints at ChatControl: there is a valid argument against it (still looking for more), and we need to use it.

> Even though the OS has to "read" your messages in order to print them on your screen.

The phoning home part is the key difference.

Item (2) is so broad that you could fit anything trough it.

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