this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Facebook should be better at moderation. I'm not familiar with the Child Porn myself, but I think this is a problem with moderation that relies on reporting versus somewhat more proactive moderation, such as automatically scanning content (with human review).
I expect the moderation to frustrate the efforts of scammers, extremists, and terrorists so that scams are no longer profitable and so that they can no longer spread hate and terror as effectively.
Scams will always be profitable. The difference between scamming someone in real life and scamming them via the internet isn't all the much different.
Scammers use phone calls to scam people too. Are you suggesting we tap and monitor everyone's phones for keywords?
The thing about privacy is that you seem to be willing to let people or organisations (that we can't prove have our best interest at heart) violate people's privacy in order to get the result you want. And there's no proof that you will get that result.
Meanwhile someone who's human has to make the determination that something is criminal or something is CP and that means we have to pay people to comb through all that data.
That's very taxing on the individuals involved. It does harm to them.
Now I'm sure you'll say something about expectation of privacy when submitting anything to the web. But people do have the expectation of privacy online. Take a look at people who are deliberately de-googling or up in arms about web sites collecting their data to target them with ads.
It is! People are wary of scams, it's not worth wasting an hour trying to scam one random person anymore. Spending a few hours trying to spam millions of people is a worthwhile use of a scammer's time, especially when there's no risk of being banned or caught.
That's not a solution I would pose for that problem, no, but there are laws in place intended to reduce spam calling, and many, many tech companies are proposing many, many solutions for that, and nobody is saying "oh no, what if you accidentally classify an innocent telemarketing-spammer as a scammer?" Good riddance.
I think people should use e2ee-enabled chat services if they expect privacy. Telegram users don't bother turning on secret chats because they lack all of the features that make people want to use telegram. I think Whatsapp users have a much more reasonable expectation of privacy, and Whatsapp still goes through efforts to reduce spam and misinformation on its platform. I think Matrix users have a more reasonable expectation of privacy (since encryption is on by default, and can be used in group chats and spaces and on calls and with every other matrix feature), but Matrix servers still do not federate with Al Qaeda rocket.chat servers, because they know better.
Telegram has to. It can afford to. I'll remind you that I did not set criminality as the bar.
Now think of what it does to the rest of the people who have to see it. If you can pay one person to willingly review content for child porn that couldn't be identified in advance so a million others don't have to see it, is that really the worst thing?
Data collection feels very different to me, but you're specifically sending your messages to Telegram. Like, Google scanning my emails is something I have trouble objecting to (although I object to the use of that information for ad-related purposes, of course).
By "de-googling," do you mean the whole "right to be forgotten" thing? I think that's nonsense, clearly at odds with the right to remember, and largely used by wealthy assholes to deflect attention from shitty things they did.
I'm a mixed bag of agree and disagree on these points but I'm only going to point out that the "De-Googling" trend doesn't really have anything to do with the right to be forgotten. It has more to do with enshittification - Google shutting down services, making their current services harder to use, charging money for what used to be free services, charging more money for already paid services, adding ads, etc etc. Basically people finding alternative software to Google because Google's practices have become increasingly volatile and their services less and less reliable.
To hear people on the privacy subreddits and even the privacy Lemmy communities tell it, it's absolutely about the data these companies are collecting. I'll grant you it's about what the companies are perceived to be doing with the data the collect (serving ads), but I don't think I personally ever made the point that op did (that it was about right to be forgotten).
Either way, I think op may have missed my point. As technology evolves people will find new ways to abuse it. And there's a level of privacy people should have the expectation of, and our privacy laws don't do enough as it is. Op is really suggesting that we further violate everyone's privacy in the name of protecting them and they don't want to hear that it's a bad idea or one where we would have to put our trust in a company or companies to apply this monitoring.
They also don't seem to want to hear about the burn out rate of people tasked with moderating content and validating that that content is against TOS or breaks the law. Having humans trawl communities or even just messaging app text data for CP and scams is bound to have a detrimental effect.
Sure. But I can't blame them for collecting data that I literally decide to send them for no reason but my own, I can only blame them for using that data in a shitty way.
If I post something on Instagram, I know that they're collecting the photo I post, that's how posting works, that's not the issue. The issue comes if they try scanning peoples' faces to invade their privacy, or build an advertising profile about me. Sending unencrypted chat messages is not that different.
If I download Whatsapp, and I enable the contacts permission, and it uploads all of the Contacts data on my phone, that's super not okay, because I never wanted to give them that data in the first place, they just jacked it.(I disable contacts permission for whatsapp on my phone, but most users would never know that data gets uploaded to begin with.
Users are responsible for the conduct and permissions they give to companies. Absolving them of that responsibility doesn't make sense ethically or legally. We can't just say "they didn't know because WhatsApp didn't tell them". That's not really an accurate statement. They more than likely agreed to use the app and in exchange they would receive free use and WhatsApp would receive that data. But they more than likely didn't read the agreement before agreeing. That's on them.
But not in the same way that it's on them if they don't know that when they post a post to facebook, facebook has the post.
one of these things is sheer vapid stupidity, one of them is a failure of extreme vigilance in a modern nightmare society.
You can make a private group on Facebook where you can exchange messages without anyone who lacks system access being able to view them. That's how CP rings hide what they're doing. And Facebook allows it until someone reports it or the cops subpoena that data. Which is basically the same as every other messaging platform or social media site that allows such functionality. So what was it you wanted them (Facebook, or WhatsApp, or signal or telegram) to do? Delete the accounts or known terrorists whether they are or aren't using the platform for terrorist activities? Because I don't really understand what you're advocating for. You appear to very much be advocating for people's private messages to be scanned and possibly read by a human being if they trip the algorithm. So yes. You are advocating for an invasion of privacy.
My point here was that people would be stupid to expect that their information is private from facebook.
I also have to imagine that you're wrong, I'm sure they have proactive means to scan for CP and ban it whenever they become aware of it, and just don't have the means to always ban CP groups immediately. Like, knowing your company controls child porn and allowing it to remain in control is a great way to end up in prison, most corporate douchebags prefer to avoid prison if they can. Like, Zuckerberg does not want to go to jail just so he can get a few more ad bucks from pedos.
I feel very weird defending Facebook, they're quite evil, but your conspiracy theory is silly.
You seem like you're focused on private groups, which I think are still problematic on Telegram as they are on Facebook, but you're really neglecting the issue of the fully public broadcast groups Hamas is known for, and known for engaging in terrorist activity on, including the al-Qassam Brigades! Why can't Telegram ban the fucking public channel for the al-Qassam Brigades? Doesn't that just make the issue so obvious?
That would be good, but also, if you know somebody is a terrorist, isn't that at least enough cause to look through their non-encrypted chats to see if they really are or are not using the platform for terrorist activities?
Meh. If your public messages and stories and large group messages (which are really not private in any meaningful sense) trip an algorithm with high confidence, then scanning your unencrypted kinda-private-ish messages after that doesn't seem like a big problem, and human review after a high-confidence trip there doesn't seem too bad either.
Ohhhhh that de-Googling. Yeah, I've done a bit of that, disabled the Google app on my phone entirely since Firefox does its job better, but I'm on Android and doing all that setup every time I get a new phone is just a headache.