Do they actually know how the technology works? They will have to scan everything inbound and outbound connections, basically managed devices.
Apple and Google have been given a three-month ultimatum to make it impossible for children to take, share or view nude images on their smartphones, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Monday.
Maybe hold the parents accountable. Betya then they’ll start caring about what their children are doing. Because yes, while there are adult perpetrators, there are also children themselves selling media they create on things like roblox servers. It’s a rabbit hole.
Bonus: you don’t have to invalidate everyone’s right to fucking privacy.
Extra credit: you can still tax the fuck out of these trillion dollar corporations that are ruining the world.
I’m not sure if I agree with this take. To me, it is similar to saying we shouldn’t give kids free lunches, cause it’s the parents responsibility to feed their kid.
Like yeah, parents should be feeding their kid. But it’s also unreasonable to think that every single parent is doing that. It’s just not realistic, so we should definitely be feeding kids when they aren’t getting it at home.
On the same token, I don’t see anything wrong with trying to protect kids from talking with strangers, or getting sent explicit material, when their parents don’t know or care how to do it themselves.
The lunch analogy is too generic for the complexity here and I think it breaks down entirely given the innate assumption that a parent’s responsibility is only a parent’s responsibility, which isn’t true.
Should the government provide free school lunches? Absolutely. That requires funding and legislative will. The government has a responsibility (well, theoretically) to protect and serve its people, including children and families. An overlap of responsibility if you will. Free school lunches does not infringe on anyone’s rights and instead betters communities, eases burden on struggling parents, and helps students perform and receive proper nutrition. And should a family or student wish to not receive a school lunch, they are free to opt out and bring their own. It doesn’t require scanning every student’s lunchbox or installing surveillance infrastructure in every kitchen. The intervention is proportionate to the problem.
Starmer’s proposal isn’t. Preventing nude image sharing at the device level requires either client-side scanning of all communications or breaking end-to-end encryption entirely. That’s mass surveillance infrastructure installed on every phone, affecting every adult, every journalist, every abuse survivor using encrypted messaging, every person who has ever sent a legal private image to another consenting adult. And unlike our lunch analogy, a family or student, nor an unaffiliated person altogether, has little to no option to opt out should they use one of these major platforms/devices. The harm of the intervention is categorically larger than the harm it addresses.
A better analogy: should a parent leave alcohol or an unsecured firearm accessible to a child? No, and we hold parents accountable for that. We don’t require routine home inspections of every household to verify compliance. The accountability lands on the person who chose to bring the dangerous item into proximity with the child and who controls access to it. The parent pays for the phone. The parent pays for the data plan. The parent hands the child the device. The tools to monitor and restrict that device already exist, provided by the large platforms, on routers, etc, and are largely unused.
The problem is real. The solution being proposed requires dismantling privacy for everyone to address the failures of some. There are targeted interventions that haven’t been exhausted. Those who stand to benefit are not the children, but the companies able to profit off the data collected and the governments able to invade privacy where there wasn’t said existing infrastructure to do so.
This is a controlling party (government/private companies) abusing a moral panic which has been common throughout history. Just look at the Patriot Act.
I mostly agree with everything you say, except for one thing.
I’m pretty sure it’s technically possible to detect nude images, on device, 100% securely, without anyone ever knowing it was detected. This probably isn’t the approach that some corporations will take, but as far as I am aware, this is how the current nude detection on iPhone works. It’s all on device, and just blurs it so the user has to accept a warning before seeing the content. If you control your phone, you can disable it. If it’s a phone setup for a child, the child cannot disable it. It’s up to the parent to specify what the child is allowed to do.
then enforce child predator laws. or rape laws in general. thats a REAL rabbit hole that will disgust any normal person. the problem is that nobody wants to deal with the actual problem so they outsource it to privacy nightmares like what we are seeing now