- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure. This isn’t about child safety; it’s about the end of private devices and the death of the “nothing to hide” fallacy.
You must log in or # to comment.
This is the UK, not China. Or at least, it’s supposed to be.
What are we, a bunch of Asians?
That’s based on government surveillance, not skin color. As reductionist as it is, China has been the poster boy for government surveillance since the 90s at very least.
China has been seen as the poster boy for government surveillance since the 90s at the very least by Western propaganda.
Fixed that for you.
It’s not just propaganda though. By basically all accounts China is a highly surveilled country.
While China has surveillance, it’s generally different methods and to different ends. Assuming certain documentaries can be trusted in the first place, you’re looking at naming and shaming operations for social rules at street crossings and censoring shit like racism and misogyny from social media, things it can’t even do amazingly since they’d have to surveille 1.4 billion people, about 5 times the population of the USA.
Even under central planning and a huge industrial base, we’re not looking at an easy job. Assume general techniques update every ten years, now you have to retrofit a city you built a decade ago. Even with automation, you’d need a huge base of trustworthy people to monitor multiple fronts, all while keeping your nation profitable enough to sustain all this.
We’re moving towards a world where everyone has an approved device for official purposes and anyone who wants privacy has a second Linux/alternate android OS device for everything else 😬
At what point do we stop carrying around a phone? Or should I call it the snitch in my pocket.
Nah, just remove Google from your phone.
Or buy one that already has done that. Costs a few hundred
Good thing Android doesn’t include Google by default
I dont think that will last much longer. We have to work harder on linux phones
How? Android is open source. You can just fork it
All Android forks are, to maintain compatibility with the used apps (LinageOS, e/OS, Degoogled Android …)
Ok you fork it and create a FOSS mobile OS. If it was that easy we would already have alternatives. The core is open source but google has been and is trying it’s best to slowly take over the OS. I’m honestly not very knowledgeable about android so I don’t remember the exact details.
We don’t need to, because AOSP works great.
graphene is the way
ultimatum: build device-level scanning to detect “illegal images” or we’ll pass laws to force your hand.
As if Google and Apple wouldn’t be more than happy to do this, if they aren’t already.
Apple proposed something a few years ago, when governments were making similar threats, that attempted to strike a middle ground. The idea was that upon uploading an image to iCloud Photos, a on-device scan would be run on that image and an encrypted report generated to be sent up along with the photo. There was differential privacy involved, the report would also sometimes be generated for entirely normal photos, so seeing a report didn’t necessarily indicate anything, and they had set it up such that the server would only be able to decrypt the reports if it had a sufficiently large number of photos that had been actually found to be CSAM by the local scan, so there would have to be many false positives to incorrectly get flagged.
It was incredibly controversial, and they ended up not doing it after all. In my opinion, it’s probably the lightest touch and most responsible way to do something like this, and obviously they always pick the most worthy cause for invading privacy… but I still viscerally dislike the idea that my computer would have code designed to try to get me sent to prison under certain circumstances (not that I’d ever be triggering that code with anything but a false positive of course). Somehow it’s worse than just saying “in the cloud you have no privacy, your photos aren’t encrypted on our servers, and if you upload CSAM we’ll drop a train on you.”
The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure.
Nothing has gone through parliament yet. That’s not to say that a majority of twats couldn’t be found there. But crucially I think this is not something a floundering PM can decree on his own authority. So far this threat is about as believable as any statement by the incumbent American president on Iran.
This post is acrid; I’m venting. You’ll probably feel attacked.
I’d like a serious answer, but I’ll probably will only get replies from petulant adult-children though. That’s not a provocative jab; it’s a statement of disgust. The whole consumer side of tech is largely adult-children who fail to take any responsibility. This isn’t even new. From day dot commercial software vendors have been exploiting you.
the market only has two offerings: Google’s Android and Apple’s <whatever their mobile-computer O.S. is called>
Does no one see an issue with this? A duopoly? It’s not even one market in one country, it’s nearly a duopoly on a global scale.
get mad at increasing surveillance by surveillance companies (Google, Apple, et al.)
scream at internet, for the Nth time
Just don’t use them.
but my Discord my Bank apppppp~
You’re all willingly giving up your autonomy whilst crying about it. Why? Just why? The alternatives aren’t good enough for your pampered ass? Stick an external battery to the pinephone and suddenly it lasts for two days.
That’s too goofy; what would my friends think of me?
Install GrapheneOS on models that support it.
Too many buttons to click; it should all be done for me. Waaaaaa~
Too hard to escape the Google/Apple ecosystem
Are you all for real? Pressing buttons on your computer is too hard? Holy shit.
It really is getting old. I think people are just too busy amd stresswd to think about why they shouldn’t do that.
The UK PM has just announced an under-16 social media ban.
This is the ‘Trojan Horse’ in action. You cannot enforce a ban without an Age Verification layer, and you can’t have Age Verification without a National Digital ID or biometric database. They are using the ‘child safety’ card to build a mandatory surveillance gate for the entire internet.
Between the new taxes and the constant bans, it’s clear this government has zero respect for personal agency or digital sovereignty. If you aren’t already moving your data off the cloud and into your own home lab, start now. The gap between our current society and a total surveillance state just got a whole lot smaller.
