Calling it “also about catching criminals” is a framing trick. Sure, if you surveil 450 million people you’ll find some criminals - that’s statistically inevitable. But you’ll also drag far more innocents into suspicion.

Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.

That imbalance isn’t collateral damage - it’s the defining flaw of mass scanning. It would overwhelm police, damage lives, and normalise suspicion of everyone. And “compromise” here only means deciding how much of that broken trade-off to accept.

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amelius 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Even under generous assumptions - 0.01% offender prevalence, 90% detection accuracy, and just 1% false positives - you’d correctly flag ~40,500 offenders while generating ~4.5 million false alarms. For every offender, over 110 innocents are treated as suspects.

Playing devil's advocate here, but you can skew those numbers however you want. I.e., given any classifier and corresponding confusion matrix, you can make the number of false positives arbitrarily low, at the cost of more false negatives.

	▲	p_l 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		We have already experience with how false positives are skewed in practice, even case goes all the way to court. Because ostensibly good people do not want to see the CSAM material, they believe what algorithm/first reporter stated, and ofc nobody "good" wants to let a pedophile go free. And so the algorithm tries to hang a parent for making photo of skin rash to send to doctor (happened with Google Drive scanning) or a grandparent for having a photo of their toddler grandkids playing in kiddy pool (happened in UK, computer technician happened upon the photo and reported to police, if not for lawyer insisting to actually verify the "CSAM material" the prosecution would not actually ever check what the photo was of)

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pcrh 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed.

Targeted surveillance of individuals under suspicion can be legitimate, however it surprises me that such mass surveillance continues to be promoted again and again, despite it being demonstrably harmful. Along with breaking encryption, which would introduce risks of large financial and commercial harm.

I often wonder what arguments are actually deployed behind closed doors in favor of mass surveillance, apart from the ever-present "think of the children" argument. It can't be the case that the downsides of such surveillance are unknown to those supporting it (or maybe it can?).

	▲	bux93 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's the same reason police (in every country) are always asking for more powers, and then end up not using them effectively. It's a cycle where crime is not perfectly prevented/punished, politicians blame the police, police blame not having enough powers, and then they get more. But the wrong ones to prevent the next tragedy, well, in hindsight of course. So new powers are needed yet again. (And no-one needs to examine why the existing powers are not used effectively, since the underlying problems there would probably be a lot more expensive and boring to fix, e.g. better pay/hours, better management, education, outreach, blahblahblah.) Then those powers are abused, curtailed a bit, and the cycle starts again.
	▲	aleph_minus_one 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> however it surprises me that such mass surveillance continues to be promoted again and again, despite it being demonstrably harmful. Because citizens don't send the respective politicians to hell.

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amelius 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah but that wasn't my point.

My point is that "this isn't about catching criminals" is the wrong wording.

You don't start a debate by twisting the words of the other party. No matter how right you are. Otherwise you will be seen as a pariah.

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varispeed 4 days ago | parent [-]

But this isn't about catching criminals.

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amelius 4 days ago | parent [-]

For _you_ it isn't.

If you want to be heard in a heated debate, choose your words wisely.

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varispeed 3 days ago | parent [-]

That’s a common derail - shifting from the substance to “watch your wording.” It’s a form of concern-trolling: pretending the problem is rhetoric while sidestepping the actual flaw.

The numbers don’t change based on phrasing. Mass scanning at EU scale inevitably flags orders of magnitude more innocents than offenders. Saying “this isn’t about catching criminals” isn’t twisting words, it’s highlighting that the stated goal is statistically self-defeating.

The “catching criminals” line is deliberate gaslighting. It’s crafted to reassure people who don’t understand how these systems work, while the real function is mass surveillance of everyone.

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amelius 3 days ago | parent [-]

> That’s a common derail - shifting from the substance to “watch your wording.”

You're acting like I'm trying to derail the argument. That is not the case.

You are putting a lot of assumptions in your wording. This will not help you.

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varispeed 3 days ago | parent [-]

Classic gaslight: accuse me of twisting and ‘acting’ while you’re the one twisting. The wording isn’t the issue - the substance is. And you’ve avoided it entirely.

	▲	amelius 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's because literally everybody here agrees with the substance. There is no discussion here other than how to best bring the point across to those who do not agree.