Most everyone would love to see more work on stopping child sexual abuse.

But this is the ultimate "grant me dictatorial powers so I can do good" play.

Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law that suddenly touches everyone even though offenders are a small percentage and should be able to be targeted more efficiently.

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cortesoft 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yep, and this is a perfect example of a base rate fallacy situation... even if the scanner is 99.99% accurate, because an even higher percentage of photos are innocent, most matches the scanner will find will be false positives.

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wesammikhail 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Funny you bring this up.

Back in the day when I was like 15 and DC++ was still a thing, I used to browse people's shared folders. One day I came across a file called "the paradox of false positive". It was a 1 pager that described how a machine which is 99.9% accurate at identifying terrorists would be completely useless due to this false positive base rate fallacy you're describing.

It really stuck with me throughout the years. It's kind o remarkable how even a 99.9% accurate heuristic is insufficient at scale.

Which begs the question: lets assume the intentions are pure (which we know they're not but lets be generous), what other options are there when 99.9% heuristic is not good enough? how do you design systems when they're guaranteed to fail as they scale up?

edit: and what do you know, I just saw this as I scrolled down on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816959

	▲	m12k an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The intuition I've built is that you can't talk about a false positive rate being high or low on its own - it's always relative to the actual occurrence rate of positives in the tested population. E.g. if there's a 1 in 10000 risk of a false positive, but real positives also are only 1 out of 10000 tested cases, then a positive case will have a 50/50 chance of being a false positive (because for every 10000 tests, you'll have on average one false positive and one real positive). So a false positive rate can only be said to be low if it's significantly lower than the real occurrence rate of positives.

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bonoboTP 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The bad consequences are diffuse, abstract and distant (conspiracy-looking, tinfoil-like), while it's very easy to viscerally understand that "even if they just save one child, it's already worth it".

They should give precise numbers of how many such crimes are detected via such means or are expected to be detected per year, and how many of those are not possible to catch through regular investigative work. It just seems ridiculously out of proportion especially that with all this flurry around the topic, the criminals surely aren't using WhatsApp for this any more, but especially won't be once the law is adopted. Sure, many are likely stupid but if they are so stupid, won't they fall into other honeypots?

Why are chat apps the best leverage for uncovering this? They'd have to justify this with some sort of data and numbers.

Because later they can just come back and say, well unfortunately they are now all using other means, so now we need to break https,we need to ban e2e, we need to ban vpns, tor and foss operating systems etc etc.

	▲	iamnothere an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They should add to those metrics: hours and funds wasted investigating false positives, reputations ruined from false accusations and investigations, decline in public trust, etc.

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attila-lendvai an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

especially that the guard applying to protect the henhouse seems to have a suspiciously furry tail...

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ggthrowaway 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

CSA makes ppl lose all logic, so is used to justify illogical things.

Reminder that none of this has any evidence that it helps CSA, but nobody cares about the actual children.

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teaearlgraycold 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I feel like the world cares more about stopping the spread of CSAM than it does the actual abusive actions against children.

	▲	mrtesthah 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We can look to certain world "leaders" for confirmation of that.

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englishspot 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

so much for the principle of least privilege..

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brikym 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	wredcoll 43 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's not a hot take, it's just boring old racism.
	▲	bwhitty 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Hot take !== unsubstantiated, xenophobic take