Discussion

Reaffirming our commitment to child safety in the face of European Union inaction

sylos: Maybe if all of those companies hadn't paid large sums of money to one of the most famous child sex traffickers, their cries of "think of the children" wouldn't be so creepy

whatshisface: People in democratic countries are finding out about the corruption at high levels very, very slowly, but in some amount of time technologies like this will be crucial for protecting the human trafficking industry from democratic intervention.

bradley13: It's for the children!BS. It's for control and censorship and data harvesting.Meta alone spend $2 billion lobbying for age-restriction laws, which they tried to hide by pumping it through third parties. We don't know how much the other tech giants spent.

IncreasePosts: How is matching images against known hashes of child porn enabling control, censorship, and data harvesting?

whatshisface: It is like letting a policeman into your house to make sure you are not committing crimes. The methods (installing an AI module behind your defenses against criminal hackers that is programmed to betray you) are too invasive.

eeeficus: When you see the behemots of US tech coming together you can be sure it isn’t for anything good! These assholes are supporting and enabling the orange clown (a suspected pedophile) and they want us to believe that they suddenly care about the children.

echelon: > Reaffirming our commitment to child safety"We tried to build an even deeper panopticon to enslave you. Drats, you and your Democratic process. We thought we'd pulled the wool over your eyes claiming it was for the kids. We'll get you next time you peons. It's just a matter of time."

exyi: Same tool is very handy if you hypothetically wanted to control spread of anything else, like anti ice apps for instance.Also hash matching is so easily bypassed you can be sure they really want to add some "AI" detector as well

gruez: >Same tool is very handy if you hypothetically wanted to control spread of anything else, like anti ice apps for instance.That's a weak argument because they can already do that today with google's play protect and apple's app notarization.

nothinkjustai: I know people say Apple’s commitment to privacy is all talk, and there are valid criticisms of Apple and their business practices, but they seem better than the other big tech companies like Meta, MS, and Google by a very wide margin when it comes to privacy.At this point every tech product I own is an Apple product and I can feel good about that. Thanks, Apple.

gruez: >Maybe if all of those companies hadn't paid large sums of money to one of the most famous child sex traffickersSource? Specifically that they paid "large sums" after it came out they were child sex traffickers? Otherwise you can't (or should) expect companies to be doing private investigations prior to donating.

agilob: Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, colleagues of Jerry Epstein, are committed to protect your children. From whom? Are they going to scan all emails and use AI to rat on their buddies?

kubb: This is great, Google vs EU. Which one does HN hate more? Can't wait to find out.

nothinkjustai: Somehow it’ll be Apple

freetanga: Their CEO was clapping the day a child molester became President of the USA.Any googler should feel shamed, but google is no longer what it used to be.

clemailacct1: Whether I agree or not - it’s comments like these that make HN feel like hivemind Reddit where people just seethe and rage post.

throwaway132448: Maybe we’re just bored of the doublethink? It doesn’t take a hive mind to feel that.

FabCH: Interesting way to frame the fact that the members of the european parliament voted 311 to 218 yesterday to reject the companies right to spy on you.I'm the first person to admit the EU has democratic deficit, but MEPs are directly elected by EU citizens and they chose this in a democratic process. The companies are certainly making a choice with this blogpost.

SpicyLemonZest: I dunno, man. If tech companies responded to a failure to extend interim guidance by terminating their CSAM detection programs, and claimed when challenged that the EU made them do it, I'm pretty confident there would be much more outrage about "malicious compliance". If the EU wants companies to stop detecting CSAM until the final guidance arrives, they should say so directly.

FabCH: They did.EU Commission reported that the false positive rate was 13-20%.German police reported that 50% of all reports were wrong.The system is rubbish and the EU MEPs were quite open about wanting it to go away.

SpicyLemonZest: [delayed]

notrealyme123: How about we protect the children from Google and meta? Making children into depressed social media addicts is not great.

ninjahawk1: It’s never “for the children”, it’s about control and money.

mehov: The important thing you need to know about EU Chat Control is that the politicians will be exempted from the mass surveillance they are about to build.https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

b00ty4breakfast: "We are once again sending out checks to EU commissioners to get our handcrafted legislation put into law"

FabCH: Yes? The Pirate Party has MEPs, it’s not exactly difficult to find their quotes. 3 seconds of searching was enough to find the following quote from MEP Markéta Gregorová:„We can now finally say with certainty that Chat Control 1.0 will end on April 3 without replacement. The European Parliament has sent a clear signal: it is time to put an end to this ineffective and disproportionate derogation from privacy rules. Under the pretext of protecting children, millions of private messages from innocent citizens were being scanned for years without delivering adequate results. This system simply did not work and had no place in a democratic society.“It doesn’t have to be unanimous on HN. It wasn’t even unanimous in the EUP.But what it was is legal and democratic. And the discussion in the parliament explicitly included the fact that the companies will either have to stop, or find a different legal grounding.The companies in this blog post are effectively admitting they are making a choice to go against the law.

oybng: days since google was evil: 0

dygd: > This is not just a matter of law, but of protecting children.They didn't even write this themselves.

ahartmetz: Let's try to keep the conversation about the issues instead of tribal outrage bait.

kubb: Riiight, my comment is the problem that lowers the quality of the very focused, issue-based discussion.

OrvalWintermute: BigTech is quickly trying to punt their legal liabilities from their alleged actions, and transfer that risk elsewhere e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/jury-orders-meta-p...

throwaway89201: So just a recap of what happened between the European Commission and the European Parliament and why the regulation has expired:- In 2022 the European Parliament voted in favor of a 2-year temporary regulation that allowed companies to (i.e. voluntarily) scan private communications. Let's call it Chat Control 1.0. In practice mostly only US companies actually implemented this.- In 2024 Chat Control 1.0 was extended for another 2 years. An amendment was adopted that explicitly noted that after this time "[the regulation] shall lapse permanently".- From 2022 to 2025 the European Commission together with member states has proposed mandatory scanning, later updated with a proposal for client-side scanning (defeating end to end encryption), AI classification of image and text content, age verification and of lot of other invasive measures. This is what is known as Chat Control 2.0. The European Parliament has again and again voted against this proposal.- In 2025/2026 the European Commission finally (temporarily) backed down from Chat Control 2.0 and instead proposed to extend Chat Control 1.0 for another 2 years, but has completely failed to negotiate with parliament to adopt a text that explicitly puts fundamental rights up front.- In response to this, the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament tabled amendments [1] that explicitly limits the regulation to the subject matter and prevents it from being used to weaken end-to-end encryption. Many of these amendments were adopted.- Consequently, many conservative members of the European Parliament voted down the entire extension of the regulation. They apparently felt that it was better to let the regulation expire so that they gain more negotiation power to adopt a version of the regulation that the has less safeguards or contains measures like in Chat Control 2.0.[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/LIBE-AM-784377...

sebastiennight: I think your recap is missing a pretty large step at the very beginning, which is that AFAIR, the EU Parliament put together this temporary regulation to a posteriori allow the scanning that was already being done, outside of the law, by those US companies on EU citizen messages ; and the temporary regulation was put in place until a proper framework could be agreed upon.