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Fighting pedophilia at the expense of our privacy: The EU rule that could break the internet (english.elpais.com)

submitted 1 year ago by boem@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[-] fubo@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

        Backdoors in consumer software cannot in fact be restricted to "legitimate" use. All it takes is one "bad apple" to leak the keys -- say, a radicalized police officer leaking them to a fascist group for use in harassing political opponents -- and those keys show up on the darknet and are directly available to abusers. This is a much larger threat than (e.g.) traditional landline telephone wiretapping.
If secure communication systems are made illegal, the organizations that build those systems (e.g. Signal) will shut down so as not to be prosecuted for "enabling child abuse". This deprives their current users, including children, of the secure communication systems they are already using today.
Sadly, law enforcement officers abuse their power quite often. They also have a higher rate of domestic abuse than the general population. Giving them power to spy on children's communication is directly enabling abusers.

[-] Dyskolos@lemmy.zip -4 points 1 year ago

Fair points. Yet those backdoors already exist for a long time now (prism et al). There are alternatives which are, and probably will be safer with the new laws. Maybe illegal then, but safe(r). Also there are always zerodays to purchase.

Whomever uses whatapp and other typical murican company-messengers (or whateever else) is already under surveillance. Maybe just no yet in the EU.

Not saying it can't get worse. It sure could.

Thanks for making your point clearer.

[-] thoughts3rased@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

You do realise data miners have been ripping WhatsApp to pieces to find traces of a back door for years right?

Nothing has ever come up.

I hate Meta as much as the next person, but when they say the messages are end to end encrypted they do mean it. Otherwise the backdoor would've certainly been found by now. Signal, iMessage and Telegram are the same.

Sure this isn't true for anything like Twitter DMs but for the ones that are end to end encrypted nobody has found a backdoor.

[-] Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 0 points 1 year ago

You can't be serious? WA got no US-Gov-backdoor? Yeah sure. I obviously can't proove that they have, but i couldn't think of a single reason why Meta and the likes shouldn't neatly cooperate. Customers are sheeple anyway, they could name WA asshat-messenger and they'd still use it. They wouldn't mind nor care. The gov (any gov) would surely show love.

Besides that it's closed source. They say E2E. But can I verify?

So, you're saying prism et al were just fakenews and govs don't listen already? And it's not just about those that really offer true, verifyable E2E?

Not that i would care about meta & the likes, i don't use that shit, but I'd be glad if I'd be wrong.

this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023

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