Re:EU "Chat Control" and Mandatory Client Side Scanning
by wkat4242 on Thursday October 12, 2023 @10:27PM
(#37865829)
> No one can deny there is a problem with pedophile material and to say to protect the purity of free speech all such issues have to stay unaddressed is just a position blind to reality.
This is not about free speech at all. Free speech is about censoring public speech and publication. Publishing this kind of material is already an exception of free speech and nobody disagrees with that.
This proposal is about the private communication of all citizens. Not only is it a disproportional measure, it's also ineffective. It will not reduce the demand for this material and will only stop a particular method of distribution. The bad actors will just move to other methods including non-digital or steganography, on unmonitored or hacked devices. Just like the war on drugs doesn't work, they will find a way.
But in the meantime this will deeply undermine the privacy of all people and this tooling will inevitably be used for more purposes than originally proposed.
This is not about free speech at all. Free speech is about censoring public speech and publication. Publishing this kind of material is already an exception of free speech and nobody disagrees with that.
This proposal is about the private communication of all citizens. Not only is it a disproportional measure, it's also ineffective. It will not reduce the demand for this material and will only stop a particular method of distribution. The bad actors will just move to other methods including non-digital or steganography, on unmonitored or hacked devices. Just like the war on drugs doesn't work, they will find a way.
But in the meantime this will deeply undermine the privacy of all people and this tooling will inevitably be used for more purposes than originally proposed.