I can't wait for the EU to preemptively delete emails with language that is supposedly deemed offensive or possibly containing misinformation or god forbid, pictures of my nieces and nephews which could be interpreted as child grooming.
Yes, we should all let the governments decide if we should have access to our email addresses and pinky promise they won't use your data against you if one day you decide to disparage the sitting president/prime minister of the country you reside in.
The EU is pushing to intercept and scan all private chat messages and all emails to "protect" the children and give all this information to Europol to keep in perpetuity so they can build a profile on you but sure everything is peachy.
Then you have the German chancellor saying that we should all have our real names attached to all our online accounts but rest assured, nothing nefarious going on here.
France arrested the Telegram founder a few months ago for no apparent reason and the French Justice minister also not long ago wanted to ban EtoE because it makes their job harder so wouldn't it be nice if everyone could just simply share their private life with the government voluntarily?
The UK is looking into getting rid of VPNs to, you guessed it, "protect the children" and Denmark has re-introduced blasphemy laws.
Finally there is the DMA that has been approved the EU which outlaws hate speech on online platforms except that hate speech is never defined in the text so you can pretty much use this law to ban any content you want without due process and without consulting the population.
The US has many flaws, nobody is denying that but to assume that the EU has better privacy is a mirage from a bygone era. The EU politicians are now looking at what China is doing and use that as playbook.
> In politics, we engage in debates in our society using our real names and without visors. I expect the same from everyone else who critically examines our country and our society.
Whats the problem with this exactly? As a politician who is part of the government then every action by these people should be scrutinised intensely. We should know who they meet, when and what was agreed.
Nobody is forcing these people to become politicians but expecting transparency from people who govern us is the least we should expect from them.
We as citizens, get to criticise the decisions they take but we are not the ones in power so expecting the same transparency is completely unwarranted.
> Merz warned that liberal democracy was at risk and said he had underestimated the extent to which algorithms and artificial intelligence could be used for targeted influence campaigns.
What a bad take. As if governments would not use these same tools to shape opinions.
> He said such tools made it possible to manipulate opinion and to undermine the foundations of a free society.
Friendly newspapers and public funded news channels have been used by various governments to manipulate opinions just as much in the past.
To claim that suddenly anonymous comments on social media will bring the end of democracy as we know it is just pure fear mongering and speculation.
If Mertz feel so inclined to only engage with people who post under their real names, he can just sign up to a social media service that requires this from their users and see what happens.
Europe is really turning into a China light these days with their dreams of client side scanning of messages and the end of privacy on the internet.
Why always bringing back everything to racism? The people of Switzerland want to maintain the look an feel of their country as it is. How is racism the first thing you think of when no one mentionned race?
What happens when the governments around the world decide to ban something that you care about? Will you be so eager to agree with them or will you cry that your rights and your freedom are being taken away?
Don't like social media, fine, nobody is forcing you to use it.
> Direct your anger at the geriatrics in government who don't understand the risks of these laws first.
No offence but I think you are being extremely naive if you think that the people in power and the lobbyists who have spent the last 10 years relentlessly pushing for ID verification online and mass content scanning in the US and in the EU do not know what they are doing.
Here is the thing, most people are increasingly unhappy about the way things are going whether they are on the right or the left of the political spectrum. Governments can see that and don't want to see what happened in Nepal recently repeat itself. So they are getting ahead of the curve.
First require everyone to ID themselves online, then tie everything you say to your ID then use that against you one day if you decide that enough is enough.
The western countries are looking at what China is doing and simply iterating on it. They wrap it in a nit little bow to either "fight terrorism" TM or "protect the children" TM.
This is a pure power play meant to save their asses and the people who have been warning that this was always going to be going in that direction have been ridiculed and called conspiracy nuts but here we are.
Look at OFCOM in the UK. First it was to protect children form porn. Now they are looking to expand their powers to moderate speech online based on what THEY think is acceptable. If the EU gets it's way, you'll have client scanning in all messaging apps across the EU. And it won't stop.
This sort of thing is never about protecting kids, reducing harm or whatever they call it. It's about control about what you see, what you write, all done with the purpose to determine if you as an individual will become a problem for them in the future.
This is just pointless whataboutism. There are smart devs and crypto experts designing a sound, privacy-friendly system that is open source. It does what is supposed to do and how everybody would want it to be implemented. Yet people reject it on irrational grounds for whatever negative aspect they associate the EU with.
No matter how open source something is, as long as you can only run it on a non-rooted Google or Apple device, and it’s hardcoded with remote attestation features exclusive to these two platforms, it suddenly isn’t much better than a bro asking you to trust him.
Btw the other guy has a point, by definition you can’t support both privacy and something that obliterates it.
It's funny how pointing a fact is called whataboutism.
You trust the EU's pinky promise a keep their word that your ID will be safe and secure and never tied to what you say, the content of your messages or who you send them to. If that is so, then go ahead and use it. That's your business.
> whatever negative aspect
The EU literally wants to read your personal messages because it doesn't trust that you are not some criminal in disguise. Instead of the state having to prove that you are criminal breaking the law, it wants to read everything you send and store the data permanently in case you break the law one day. If you think that is acceptable and that is an entity that can be trusted, then I don't know what to tell you.
If I understand correctly how this works, it doesn't require trust or knowledge. The service gets exactly 1 bit of information (over/under the required age), the government system gets nothing.
"Don't trust, verify". It is an open protocol based on cryptography for everyone to verify that simply does not allow to submit identity information when you perform the age verificaiton check. There is no opinion here, no "you have to trust X not to do that later" - it is the property of the used technology to just submit the verified age. You can't derive identity information now or in the future just if you age-verified yourself. You are being paranoid and talking about a fantasy, non-existing system that is not the one I linked to.
On a side note, whataboutism is not about "stating a fact". It is when the stated fact has nothing to do or does not interfere with the original point being made. As in "Why would I trust the EUDI act when the EU does shenanigans like come up with stupid norms of the shape of bananas" - Stated is a fact, but it has nothing to do with the actualy EUDI act.
At this point, it's just something stupid people say. It used to mean that when you pointed out that my people were desperate for the freedom of living under capitalism, I would point out that you lived in an apartheid state.
Somehow, here, "whataboutism" means that if after you point out that the EU is coming up with an age verification system that they claim preserves personal privacy, I point out that the EU is also very much, openly, against any sort of personal privacy. Somehow that's some form of communist propaganda. Or Russian propaganda. Terrorist? Whatever. The important part is that I'm someone who should be watched or arrested if I continue to question your motives on behalf of our enemies.
They already exists except that most people don't know about it and also it is extremely hard to move over all the existing users from Whatsapp to something less popular and less user friendly.
Until that changes, then the governments around the world are going to keep pushing to get access to all our messages in order to "protect the children" TM and ask you to prove that "you are not a child" TM
> When big tech tosses money at Republicans and the Trump inauguration, they get what they paid for.
This has nothing to do with republicans in particular. This is concerted effort by lobbying groups around the world who want to get more of your data.
Case and point: all the EU countries that are currently banning teens from using messaging services and social media apps which can only be enforced if you force everyone using these services to provide some form of ID to prove that you are allowed to use them.
Not too mention the EU itself trying force a backdoor into every messaging app "to protect the children".
Be mad at the US politicians if you want but just know that the situation is not better in the EU, on the contrary it's going downhill very fast and that has nothing to do with Trump.
Many EU countries provide digital frameworks for privacy preserving age verification. Yet, Discord made an active choice to avoid using them and is asking the users to upload their photos and ids.
Those same methods of identification are created by the same people who just a few months ago were arguing if it was legal to read all your private messages in case you are criminal of some sort without warrant , without due process. You'll understand if I don't trust them.
I am surprised to see the positive takes on this sort of thing on HN considering that we all know that is just the first step of many steps that the current governments worldwide are rolling out.
Once we agree to that, then next time, you'll need to upload your ID to do something else and by the way you don't mind proving that you are not a psychopath and/or a sexual predator if you want to keep using WhatsApp/Telegram and other services?
You also don't mind if we scan your private messages now, do you? We just want to make sure that you are are not some sort of extremist/activist or someone who might cause trouble.
The slippery slope is real.
We look down at China, Russia and Iran for silencing the voices of the protesters and dissidents but we are slowly building the infrastructure that will enable future governments to do just that in the future.
Once everything is locked down and tied to your real ID, then it will be extremely easy to suppress view points or things that any government left or right doesnt want to see spread in the wild. What then?
And those who say, well, we should just wait and see what happens in Australia because if it doesn't work out then we can always turn it off or something, my question to you is when have you seen a government go back on something like this?
Yes, we should all let the governments decide if we should have access to our email addresses and pinky promise they won't use your data against you if one day you decide to disparage the sitting president/prime minister of the country you reside in.
Corporations bad! Government good! M'kay!
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