The problem right now is that they can be held liable for distributing CSAM content on their services and, since April 3, they can also be fined if they try to detect that content. It's an impossible situation.
Now, I'm not claiming that these companies always have noble intentions. But there's nothing nefarious here -- they just want regulatory certainty: do X, Y, and Z and you won't be fined or sued.
My impression is that they don't like the bad PR currently associated with various debates surrounding use of social media by children. At the same time they don't want to implement various policies that would be popular with the general public but would hurt their bottom line (ie they don't want to do the right thing).
So instead they make a big deal about various imperfections to justify draconian solutions that would see them able to implement all sorts of privacy violating measures. Thankfully that failed so now they're engaging in a smear campaign.
The current conduct of these companies in this regard is openly evil.
Implementing end-to-end encryption on relevant communication services could mitigate many risks that come with hosting user content.
It would protect users from Big Tech spying and still allow affected users to report if something sketchy is going on. Best of both worlds.
In any case, it would be a good start.
It's impossible to imagine having democratic societies where four fat cats know everything about everyone and most people know almost nothing about them, where information, instead of being scattered everywhere for resilience, is concentrated in just a few hands.
German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function (opencode.de)
I'm the first person to admit the EU has democratic deficit, but MEPs are directly elected by EU citizens and they chose this in a democratic process. The companies are certainly making a choice with this blogpost.
Yes that's what they call "EuropeanUnion inaction".
EU Commission reported that the false positive rate was 13-20%.
German police reported that 50% of all reports were wrong.
The system is rubbish and the EU MEPs were quite open about wanting it to go away.
However, the "13-20%" that you're quoting is a dishonest propaganda number itself. It's the false positive rate that a single small company (Yubo) reported. The reported false positive rates of other companies are between 0.32% and 1.5%, which is still a high error rate in absolute numbers.
Just to be clear: the report itself is full of uncertainty, convenient half truths and false causality. They for example completely rely on Big Tech platforms themselves to count false positives when a moderation decision was reversed. Microsoft apparently even claims that no user ever appealed against a decision ("No appeals reported"). There is no independent investigation into the effectiveness of the regulation at all, while it is in direct conflict with fundamental rights and required to be proportional to its goals.
The section about "children identified" is also a complete mess where most countries can't even report the most basic data, and it isn't clear if mass surveillance contributed anything to new cases at all. But somehow they still conclude "voluntary reporting in line with this Regulation appears to make a significant contribution to the protection of a large number of children", which seems extremely baseless.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/docs_autres_instituti...
As there should be.
The big tech companies have done that every time the EU passes some consumer protections, and have been spanked in court several times for the disingenuousness.
A) actually being paid in the end and
B) high enough to be of any concern to the concern.
- In 2021 the European Parliament voted in favor of a temporary regulation that allowed companies to (i.e. voluntarily) scan private communications. Let's call it Chat Control 1.0. They chose to enact this because US companies were already scanning private messages in violation of the ePrivacy Directive which had come into force in the previous year. Instead of enforcing this directive, they chose to (temporarily) legalize the scanning of private messages while preparing more permanent legislation.
- In 2024 Chat Control 1.0 was extended for another 2 years. An amendment was adopted that explicitly noted that after this time "[the regulation] shall lapse permanently".
- From 2022 to 2025 the European Commission (together with member states) has proposed mandatory scanning, later updated with a proposal for client-side scanning (defeating end to end encryption), AI classification of image and text content, age verification and a lot of other invasive measures. This is what is known as Chat Control 2.0. The European Parliament has again and again voted against this proposal.
- In 2025/2026 the European Commission finally (temporarily) backed down from Chat Control 2.0 and instead proposed to extend Chat Control 1.0 for another 2 years, but has completely failed to negotiate with parliament to adopt a text that explicitly puts fundamental rights up front, something that a majority of the European Parliament had asked for since 2021.
- In response to this, the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament tabled amendments [1] that explicitly limits the regulation to the subject matter and prevents it from being used to weaken end-to-end encryption. Many of these amendments were adopted.
- Consequently, many conservative members of the European Parliament voted down the entire extension of the regulation. They apparently felt that it was better to let the regulation expire so that they gain more negotiation power to adopt a version of the regulation that the has less safeguards or contains measures like in Chat Control 2.0.
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/LIBE-AM-784377...
While it didn't (IIRC) make a meaningful difference to the FBI, it was still a positive stance taken by Apple (albiet to aid their marketing for equating iPhone with privacy, but I'm content to avoid looking that gift horse in the mouth)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
"Reaffirming our commitment to mass surveillance"
That's more like it.
Shouldn't this big liability be pushing the big tech firms to do so?
"We tried to build an even deeper panopticon to enslave you. Drats, you and your Democratic process. We thought we'd pulled the wool over your eyes claiming it was for the kids. We'll get you next time you peons. It's just a matter of time."
Ms. von der Leyen will need to find a way to make things up for Google et al considering she has been pushing this regulation at their behest with fervour. That will probably take the form of even further prostration of Europe to US big tech.
No thanks, ChatControl is a THREAT to Democracy, and the companies pushing it must be ELIMINATED from the market for reasons of national and human security, along with the politicians lobbying for them.
BS. It's for control and censorship and data harvesting.
Meta alone spend $2 billion lobbying for age-restriction laws, which they tried to hide by pumping it through third parties. We don't know how much the other tech giants spent.
They didn't even write this themselves.
Or another analogy, back in the day, when nearly everyone was taking pictures with film cameras, the person doing the developing of your film would definitely call the cops on you if you had them develop child porn.
Also hash matching is so easily bypassed you can be sure they really want to add some "AI" detector as well
That's a weak argument because they can already do that today with google's play protect and apple's app notarization.
Its also completely unacceptable for encrypted/private messages, according to some of the top experts on the subject, "Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning": https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.07450
Except for that pesky detail of hash collisions
Add in the age verification. To make that reliable will require ID. Which can then easily be extended to provide more information than just age.
Camel. Nose. Tent.
That's not how that works, last I checked. AIUI it's much more fuzzy. Has to be, being scum doesn't automatically make you an idiot, and a single bit change would make plain old hashes entirely useless.
Insert your favourite dystopia to see where that ends up and how companies benefit from it.
Of course, things can change. One reason that I think they are serious about privacy, is because Tim Cook is a gay man, with a great deal of involvement in the gay community.
There's very few demographics, in today's world, that are as sensitive to privacy and anonymity, as gay folks.
His successor may not hold the same values.
Also, Peter Thiel is gay, and Roy Cohn was gay, so there's that...
While I want parents to be able to protect kids in a sensible manner, selling out everything and everyone else in civilization and our core values isn't a price we should ever consider sacrificing in so-called democratic societies.
Fuck you.
FTFY
Source? Specifically that they paid "large sums" after it came out they were child sex traffickers? Otherwise you can't (or should) expect companies to be doing private investigations prior to donating.