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Fighting pedophilia at the expense of our privacy: The EU rule that could break the internet
(english.elpais.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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I think that article is kind of misleading. They're not fighting pedophilia. They're using it as an excuse / instrumentalizing it to push surveillance tech.
To be honest, I think they are for real convinced that they're pushing this to help fighting pedophilia. Most of the people in the government are so stupid when it comes to technology, you can't even believe it (just watch the TikTok trial, it was the only time I had some empathy towards TikTok). And the worst part is that they tend to get consultants which are even more stupid on the topic, the only thing they have is years of work in one of the Big Four.
Lately, with right-wing populism getting closer and closer to me, I've developed some more strong opinions on dupery and selling simple answers to complex problems.
It's probably a mixed bag, to some degree. But I think the people behind it, the ones really pushing it and selling it know what they're doing. They must have read the statistics and counter-arguments to be able to take part in the political debate.
I found this article talking about the statistics of investigations in 2019 in Germany. We had 13670 cases of child abuse and the police did 21 wiretapping orders. This leads me to believe either the police/judicative is utterly useless (they're not) or, electronic surveillance isn't a tool that is useful at all in those investigations. Yet somehow ... it get's promoted in this context.
And the EU member states pledged to be transparent with the statistics regarding Chat Control. They're currently breaking that law and not giving us the statistics to judge for ourselves. (They could well be hiding it deliberately.) To me it smells like somebody wants to push something fishy.
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter how we got there. It is an emotional topic, that's why it resonates with people and it's pretending to do something and selling a simple truth, one that sounds good. While you'd need a different solution if you wanted to tackle the issue you're talking about. If they're really exploiting the abused children to push their own agenda: Shame on them.
And maliciousness going along with incompetency is the worst mix I can imagine.
(Sorry for only giving german language references. I can't spend all of my day looking up articles for my Lemmy comments. Feel free to comment better ones and I'll bookmark them.)