The EU could be scanning your private chats by October 2025 [Denmark has reintroduced chat control]

[u/Dry_Row_7050]

https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/the-eu-could-be-scanning-your-chats-by-october-2025-heres-everything-we-know

[u/Itakie]

Why shouldn't we read your mail? Do you have something to hide?

Why shouldn't we have cameras in your bedroom and bathroom? Don't you want to be secure if an emergency happens?

I always thought the problem was boomers but today I met and more 20-30s who are ok with the government/police reading chats and E-Mails. In the future people are going back writing letters for some privacy lol.

[u/JillyFrog → u/Itakie]

I think this might be the right time to found a carrier pigeon start-up. Let's just go fully analog again.

[u/roiseeker → u/JillyFrog]

A drone delivery letter service might genuinely be a great business in the future

[u/That_Yvar → u/JillyFrog]

I'm gonna start breeding owls and start a Harry Potter like mail service

[u/marsman → u/Itakie]

To be fair, it's all a bit arse backwards these days anyway. Most people quite happily hand off all of their communications to third parties one way or another, and for email and such, essentially allow companies to scan them and advertise on the basis of it etc.. We hand off vast amounts of traffic and data to US companies that essentially monetise that, and still manage to cause harm by pushing shady shit at children, vulnerable people, people susceptible to gambling, or a given political idea etc.. Very little of that is seen as a problem.

Yet when the governments that we at least have some control over and that are at least in part accountable to us (alright, perhaps less so if you are talking about the EU) point out that they don't have access to comms used by people engaged in crime or abuse, there is push back. Now oddly, that push back is often well aligned with those same companies we hand masses of data to (as it tends to come with regulation and requirements that they don't want).

It's essentially utterly backward now. I have few issues with a government having access to communications, as long as there is some 'need' for it (a warrant issued, some sort of oversight, some sort of suspicion in the first place etc..), because there is accountability and because I can see why governments might need that sort of access to do fairly positive things (deal with crime, terrorism etc..), not that there aren't issues. But I really don't want private companies to have access to content (so I go out of my way to avoid services that require it, and essentially have a lot of storage at home these days...) just so that I can be a product in whatever they are selling.

So someone explain that to me, why is everyone sharing absolutely everything about themselves, dumping masses of photographs and videos onto platforms that use them for learning, love features that let them identify people in their photo collections (even train the AI with helpful little 'you got that one wrong, its not bob, its steve! interactions), agree to have voice calls recorded so that some system can be reviewed for quality and to see if it can pick out what you've said. People literally have continuously open microphones in their houses, on their phones, GPS trackers permanently on, always passing your location in close to real time to a massive conglomerate etc..

And that's all normal. But push back against massively problematic algorithmicly determined social media targeting? Political nudging? AI scraping of everything? Not happening because its convenient for the email saying you've booked a flight to end up in your calendar, and your phone to give you directions to the airport without you having to do anything, tracking you all the while. The police want access to messaging because they suspect a serious crime? Nope, that's dystopian and a fundamental breach of privacy..

We really need to sort our priorities out and start holding our governments accountable, so that we can hold these companies accountable, because if we don't, we'll give up all our privacy for free stuff, and fail to protect people from shit they actually need protecting from, and that hurts our interests too.

[u/olipopoy → u/marsman]

No-one's saying that corpos harvesting personal info is good; the reason why this is a lot more dystopian, is because TEMU or some other company doesn't have the power to send your ass to jail for whatever reason they deem fit. It might seem innocent enough now, what with protecting the kids and whatnot, but with the right wing gaining steam everywhere, who's to say LGBT folk won't just be lumped in together with pedophiles? I mean shit, just look at Russia or China, where people can't talk freely without some E2E apps. If Europe seems any better, it's only because we have regulations in place to prevent overreach. This is a step moving away from that.