[HN Gopher] Reaffirming our commitment to child safety in the fa...
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Reaffirming our commitment to child safety in the face of
EuropeanUnion inaction
Author : upofadown
Score : 60 points
Date : 2026-04-05 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| bradley13 wrote:
| It's for the children!
|
| BS. It's for control and censorship and data harvesting.
|
| Meta alone spend $2 billion lobbying for age-restriction laws,
| which they tried to hide by pumping it through third parties. We
| don't know how much the other tech giants spent.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| How is matching images against known hashes of child porn
| enabling control, censorship, and data harvesting?
| whatshisface wrote:
| It is like letting a policeman into your house to make sure
| you are not committing crimes. The methods (installing an AI
| module behind your defenses against criminal hackers that is
| programmed to betray you) are too invasive.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Real world analogies to tech usually don't work(I _would_
| download a car), but I think in this case it would be more
| like you hire a servant, and that servant helps you out
| with whatever you ask, but if your servant sees something
| absolutely disgusting and illegal, they call the police and
| tattle on you.
|
| Or another analogy, back in the day, when nearly everyone
| was taking pictures with film cameras, the person doing the
| developing of your film would definitely call the cops on
| you if you had them develop child porn.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I'd give it that matching hashes is probably the least worse
| way of going about this
|
| Except for that pesky detail of hash collisions
| eqvinox wrote:
| > matching images against known hashes
|
| That's not how that works, last I checked. AIUI it's much
| more fuzzy. Has to be, being scum doesn't automatically make
| you an idiot, and a single bit change would make plain old
| hashes entirely useless.
|
| Insert your favourite dystopia to see where that ends up and
| how companies benefit from it.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Hash functions don't need to be bit-level sensitive. See:
| "perceptual hashing"
| exyi wrote:
| Same tool is very handy if you hypothetically wanted to
| control spread of anything else, like anti ice apps for
| instance.
|
| Also hash matching is so easily bypassed you can be sure they
| really want to add some "AI" detector as well
| gruez wrote:
| >Same tool is very handy if you hypothetically wanted to
| control spread of anything else, like anti ice apps for
| instance.
|
| That's a weak argument because they can already do that
| today with google's play protect and apple's app
| notarization.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| They already have one way of doing it therefore we should
| make a legal carve out to give them additional ways of
| doing it even though we don't want them to be able to in
| the first place.
|
| That doesn't make sense. It's a defeatist attitude that
| serves only to advantage the opponent.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| How is scanning hashes of photos you upload to your cloud
| account going to give anyone the ability to stop you from
| downloading an app?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Because at some point someone in power puts the JD Vance meme
| that was going around in as a hash.
| iamnothere wrote:
| Or leaks related to national security failures/coverups or
| exposing corruption. Or copyright infringement.
| LunaSea wrote:
| They are asking for the end of end-to-end encryption so
| client side image hashing comparison is clearly not what they
| want to do.
| eeeficus wrote:
| When you see the behemots of US tech coming together you can be
| sure it isn't for anything good! These assholes are supporting
| and enabling the orange clown (a suspected pedophile) and they
| want us to believe that they suddenly care about the children.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Came here to write this exact same thing; saw it's already
| done.
| dygd wrote:
| > This is not just a matter of law, but of protecting
| children.
|
| They didn't even write this themselves.
| FabCH wrote:
| Interesting way to frame the fact that the members of the
| european parliament voted 311 to 218 yesterday to reject the
| companies right to spy on you.
|
| I'm the first person to admit the EU has democratic deficit, but
| MEPs are directly elected by EU citizens and they chose this in a
| democratic process. The companies are certainly making a choice
| with this blogpost.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I dunno, man. If tech companies responded to a failure to
| extend interim guidance by terminating their CSAM detection
| programs, and claimed when challenged that the EU made them do
| it, I'm pretty confident there would be much more outrage about
| "malicious compliance". If the EU wants companies to stop
| detecting CSAM until the final guidance arrives, they should
| say so directly.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > I'm pretty confident there would be much more outrage about
| "malicious compliance".
|
| As there should be.
|
| The big tech companies have done that every time the EU
| passes some consumer protections, and have been spanked in
| court several times for the disingenuousness.
| generic92034 wrote:
| Spanked? Hardly ever are there fines
|
| A) actually being paid in the end and
|
| B) high enough to be of any concern to the concern.
| FabCH wrote:
| They did.
|
| EU Commission reported that the false positive rate was
| 13-20%.
|
| German police reported that 50% of all reports were wrong.
|
| The system is rubbish and the EU MEPs were quite open about
| wanting it to go away.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm sure a lot of HN commenters would agree that a CSAM
| detection system with a 13-20% false positive rate should
| be terminated, but we're not EU regulators. And you've got
| a sibling comment saying this _would_ be malicious
| compliance, so even on HN it 's not unanimous. Is there an
| example of a specific EU official, MEP, etc. explicitly
| stating that tech companies should not perform hash-based
| CSAM detection or should not perform CSAM detection at all?
| FabCH wrote:
| Yes? The Pirate Party has MEPs, it's not exactly
| difficult to find their quotes. 3 seconds of searching
| was enough to find the following quote from MEP Marketa
| Gregorova:
|
| ,,We can now finally say with certainty that Chat Control
| 1.0 will end on April 3 without replacement. The European
| Parliament has sent a clear signal: it is time to put an
| end to this ineffective and disproportionate derogation
| from privacy rules. Under the pretext of protecting
| children, millions of private messages from innocent
| citizens were being scanned for years without delivering
| adequate results. This system simply did not work and had
| no place in a democratic society."
|
| It doesn't have to be unanimous on HN. It wasn't even
| unanimous in the EUP.
|
| But what it was is legal and democratic. And the
| discussion in the parliament explicitly included the fact
| that the companies will either have to stop, or find a
| different legal grounding.
|
| The companies in this blog post are effectively admitting
| they are making a choice to go against the law.
| throwaway89201 wrote:
| The report you're referring to by the European Commission
| [1] shows that the mass surveillance of Chat Control 1.0 is
| probably not very proportional. They even note themselves
| that "The available data are insufficient to provide a
| definitive answer to this question".
|
| However, the "13-20%" that you're quoting is a dishonest
| propaganda number itself. It's the false positive rate that
| a single small company (Yubo) reported. The reported false
| positive rates of other companies are between 0.32% and
| 1.5%, which is still a high error rate in absolute numbers.
|
| Just to be clear: the report itself is full of uncertainty,
| convenient half truths and false causality. They for
| example completely rely on Big Tech platforms themselves to
| count false positives when a moderation decision was
| reversed. Microsoft apparently even claims that no user
| ever appealed against a decision ("No appeals reported").
| There is no independent investigation into the
| effectiveness of the regulation at all, while it is in
| direct conflict with fundamental rights and required to be
| proportional to its goals.
|
| The section about "children identified" is also a complete
| mess where most countries can't even report the most basic
| data, and it isn't clear if mass surveillance contributed
| anything to new cases at all. But somehow they still
| conclude "voluntary reporting in line with this Regulation
| appears to make a significant contribution to the
| protection of a large number of children", which seems
| extremely baseless.
|
| [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/docs_autres_inst
| ituti...
| bluGill wrote:
| What is the false negative rate and total rates? Without
| those we are missing too much. If the false negative rate
| (saying fine but it isn't) then the whole thing is useless.
| If the total cases are a few hundred (either CASM isn't a
| problem or those doing it use other platforms cause they
| know they will be caught on these) I don't care much that
| some are false positives - odds are it didn't get me.
| tremon wrote:
| You can not know the false negative rate without
| investigating 100% of all photos. You are asking for the
| impossible.
| bluGill wrote:
| if you want perfection. But the eu should be doing
| investigation that they can use statistics to create a
| good estimate.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Sure you can, random sampling should work. Don't just go
| making things up.
|
| Of course actually carrying out that experiment would be
| absurd since I don't think anyone expects an appreciable
| percentage of clearnet material to be CSAM. The working
| assumption is that the goal is to find a needle in a
| haystack so GP's objection about needing to know the
| false negative rate is misguided.
| bluGill wrote:
| I expect the equivelent of the fbi is investigating this
| using other sources and so has plenty of data without
| needing to randomly sample any non-suspect conversation.
| CASM has been a problem since before computers.
| echelon wrote:
| > Reaffirming our commitment to child safety
|
| "We tried to build an even deeper panopticon to enslave you.
| Drats, you and your Democratic process. We thought we'd pulled
| the wool over your eyes claiming it was for the kids. We'll get
| you next time you peons. It's just a matter of time."
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Too accurate... I hate that they will _actually keep trying_ to
| force it through until they get the outcome they want. You didn
| 't vote correctly this time, time to hold another referendum.
| Do try to vote _more responsibly_ this time around.
| sylos wrote:
| Maybe if all of those companies hadn't paid large sums of money
| to one of the most famous child sex traffickers, their cries of
| "think of the children" wouldn't be so creepy
| agilob wrote:
| Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, colleagues of Jerry Epstein,
| are committed to protect your children. From whom? Are they
| going to scan all emails and use AI to rat on their buddies?
| gruez wrote:
| >Maybe if all of those companies hadn't paid large sums of
| money to one of the most famous child sex traffickers
|
| Source? Specifically that they paid "large sums" after it came
| out they were child sex traffickers? Otherwise you can't (or
| should) expect companies to be doing private investigations
| prior to donating.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > Reaffirming our commitment to regulatory capture and mass
| surveillance
|
| FTFY
| kubb wrote:
| This is great, Google vs EU. Which one does HN hate more? Can't
| wait to find out.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Let's try to keep the conversation about the issues instead of
| tribal outrage bait.
| gruez wrote:
| >instead of tribal outrage bait.
|
| I'd say around at least a quarter of the comments in this
| thread are generic tribal/populist "outrage bait".
| debugnik wrote:
| This post is Google attempting outrage bait to push for mass
| surveillance. The comments can't get much better than the
| topic.
| kubb wrote:
| Riiight, my comment is the problem that lowers the quality of
| the very focused, issue-based discussion.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| I didn't downvote you and I saw your post as making fun of
| the bad direction more so than contributing to it.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Try to keep your bot from posting comments then.
| nothinkjustai wrote:
| Somehow it'll be Apple
| latexr wrote:
| In case someone is missing context, this is Google (apparently
| together with Meta, Microsoft, and Snap) coming out _in favour_
| of Chat Control legislation. This is something EU citizens have
| so far fought tooth and nail to repel. The fact that these US
| companies _known for spying_ on people and invading privacy in
| the name of profit are lobbying for the legislation should be a
| warning to us all to avoid their services.
| jonas21 wrote:
| They're not coming out in favor of Chat Control -- they're
| coming out in favor of having some option where they can
| operate without violating the law.
|
| The problem right now is that they can be held liable for
| distributing CSAM content on their services and, since April 3,
| they can also be fined if they try to detect that content. It's
| an impossible situation.
|
| Now, I'm not claiming that these companies always have noble
| intentions. But there's nothing nefarious here -- they just
| want regulatory certainty: do X, Y, and Z and you won't be
| fined or sued.
| fwn wrote:
| Yes, Big Tech is in a tough spot here. Obviously, no one
| wants to host CSAM or be fined for doing so.
|
| Implementing end-to-end encryption on relevant communication
| services could mitigate many risks that come with hosting
| user content.
|
| It would protect users from Big Tech spying and still allow
| affected users to report if something sketchy is going on.
| Best of both worlds.
|
| In any case, it would be a good start.
| kkfx wrote:
| It's not impossible; it's their centralised model that is.
| It's unthinkable to have private platforms on modern
| mainframes (data centers) instead of distributed,
| decentralised services where everyone holds a piece (DHT) or
| whatever they want (e.g. Nostr/Blossom), and is responsible
| for what they do.
|
| It's impossible to imagine having democratic societies where
| four fat cats know everything about everyone and most people
| know almost nothing about them, where information, instead of
| being scattered everywhere for resilience, is concentrated in
| just a few hands.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Blatantly false. They aren't liable as long as they promptly
| action reports, just like everyone else.
|
| My impression is that they don't like the bad PR currently
| associated with various debates surrounding use of social
| media by children. At the same time they don't want to
| implement various policies that would be popular with the
| general public but would hurt their bottom line (ie they
| don't want to do the right thing).
|
| So instead they make a big deal about various imperfections
| to justify draconian solutions that would see them able to
| implement all sorts of privacy violating measures. Thankfully
| that failed so now they're engaging in a smear campaign.
|
| The current conduct of these companies in this regard is
| openly evil.
| nothinkjustai wrote:
| I know people say Apple's commitment to privacy is all talk, and
| there are valid criticisms of Apple and their business practices,
| but they seem better than the other big tech companies like Meta,
| MS, and Google by a very wide margin when it comes to privacy.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Agreed. But people hate Apple, and will always throw mud at it.
| Been that way for decades. Not worth losing sleep over.
|
| Of course, things can change. One reason that I think they are
| serious about privacy, is because Tim Cook is a gay man, with a
| great deal of involvement in the gay community.
|
| There's very few demographics, in today's world, that are as
| sensitive to privacy and anonymity, as gay folks.
|
| His successor may not hold the same values.
|
| Also, Peter Thiel is gay, and Roy Cohn was gay, so there's
| that...
| g-b-r wrote:
| https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-apple-iphone-age-v...
|
| https://reclaimthenet.org/apple-removes-private-vpn-apps-fro...
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-gb/122234
| praptak wrote:
| When I see a corporation taking moral high ground I immediately
| assume their motives are nasty and 99% of the time I'm right.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Tell us about the 1% of the time you were wrong!
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| "We are once again sending out checks to EU commissioners to get
| our handcrafted legislation put into law"
| mehov wrote:
| The important thing you need to know about EU Chat Control is
| that the politicians will be exempted from the mass surveillance
| they are about to build.
|
| https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
| Geof25 wrote:
| Setup a political party and turn every citizen into politician.
| For a fee of course
| ninjahawk1 wrote:
| It's never "for the children", it's about control and money.
| notrealyme123 wrote:
| How about we protect the children from Google and meta? Making
| children into depressed social media addicts is not great.
| schubidubiduba wrote:
| Didn't they just lose a trial for enabling the grooming of
| children on their platforms?
| moezd wrote:
| Alright, at least now we can confidently put company symbols next
| to this incessant push towards Chat Control in EU parliament.
| Know your enemy, I guess.
| throwaway89201 wrote:
| So just a recap of what happened between the European Commission
| and the European Parliament and why the regulation has expired
| (it's a long story, I'm probably missing many nuances):
|
| - In 2021 the European Parliament voted in favor of a temporary
| regulation that allowed companies to (i.e. voluntarily) scan
| private communications. Let's call it Chat Control 1.0. They
| chose to enact this because US companies were already scanning
| private messages in violation of the ePrivacy Directive which had
| come into force in the previous year. Instead of enforcing this
| directive, they chose to (temporarily) legalize the scanning of
| private messages while preparing more permanent legislation.
|
| - In 2024 Chat Control 1.0 was extended for another 2 years. An
| amendment was adopted that explicitly noted that after this time
| "[the regulation] shall lapse permanently".
|
| - From 2022 to 2025 the European Commission (together with member
| states) has proposed mandatory scanning, later updated with a
| proposal for client-side scanning (defeating end to end
| encryption), AI classification of image and text content, age
| verification and a lot of other invasive measures. This is what
| is known as Chat Control 2.0. The European Parliament has again
| and again voted against this proposal.
|
| - In 2025/2026 the European Commission finally (temporarily)
| backed down from Chat Control 2.0 and instead proposed to extend
| Chat Control 1.0 for another 2 years, but has completely failed
| to negotiate with parliament to adopt a text that explicitly puts
| fundamental rights up front, something that a majority of the
| European Parliament had asked for since 2021.
|
| - In response to this, the Civil Liberties Committee of the
| European Parliament tabled amendments [1] that explicitly limits
| the regulation to the subject matter and prevents it from being
| used to weaken end-to-end encryption. Many of these amendments
| were adopted.
|
| - Consequently, many conservative members of the European
| Parliament voted down the entire extension of the regulation.
| They apparently felt that it was better to let the regulation
| expire so that they gain more negotiation power to adopt a
| version of the regulation that the has less safeguards or
| contains measures like in Chat Control 2.0.
|
| [1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/LIBE-
| AM-784377...
| sebastiennight wrote:
| I think your recap is missing a pretty large step at the very
| beginning, which is that AFAIR, the EU Parliament put together
| this temporary regulation to _a posteriori_ allow the scanning
| that was _already_ being done, outside of the law, by those US
| companies on EU citizen messages ; and the temporary regulation
| was put in place until a proper framework could be agreed upon.
| throwaway89201 wrote:
| Yes indeed, thanks for the correction. It has been a complex
| story, and I already forgot that chapter. I edited it into my
| post (also modified a wrong date of the first derogation),
| although I'm probably missing more nuances.
| oybng wrote:
| days since google was evil: 0
| dang wrote:
| Is there a more neutral and informative third-party article? The
| corporate press release is not a great genre fit for this site.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I kind of like it in this specific case because it's straight
| from the horse's mouth, laying bare their intent without
| inviting accusations of a third party having introduced
| political spin.
| FpUser wrote:
| Translation: "reaffirming our commitment to spy upon, control and
| censor users"
|
| Fuck you.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| BigTech is quickly trying to punt their legal liabilities from
| their alleged actions, and transfer that risk elsewhere e.g.
| https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/jury-orders-meta-p...
| djoldman wrote:
| Seems like if it were possible to implement end to end encryption
| where google had no way to decrypt a communication, google could
| avoid liability for facilitating transmission of CSAM?
|
| Shouldn't this big liability be pushing the big tech firms to do
| so?
| userbinator wrote:
| What a doublespeak title.
|
| "Reaffirming our commitment to mass surveillance"
|
| That's more like it.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| "Think of the children" really means "think of the government and
| big tech control, privacy data monetization and data brokering
| we're able to force on these fools".
|
| While I want parents to be able to protect kids in a sensible
| manner, selling out everything and everyone else in civilization
| and our core values isn't a price we should ever consider
| sacrificing in so-called democratic societies.
| bypdx wrote:
| The world, the internet is a place for adults. Government is NOT
| an acceptable substitute for parents.
| bypdx wrote:
| The world, including is not and should not be a safe place for
| children. The government is not and should not be a substitute
| for parenting.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Thank you, but no. We don't want mass spying. The "child safety"
| argument is simply lies and manipulation.
| kkfx wrote:
| Coming from a company that profiles children with Classroom,
| sure. Coming from those pushing for age verification, just to
| shift the Overton window of acceptability towards mandatory
| logins for everything, the end of the open web and free
| discussion, all to better feed on slaves.
|
| No thanks, ChatControl is a THREAT to Democracy, and the
| companies pushing it must be ELIMINATED from the market for
| reasons of national and human security, along with the
| politicians lobbying for them.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| We can see how monumentally important to preserving the right to
| privacy the work to stop Chat Control has been by the frothing
| anger we see displayed here. The companies which complain to
| Uncle Sam every time they're fined by the EU for getting caught
| red handed smothering competition now ask the EU for more
| regulation.
|
| Ms. von der Leyen will need to find a way to make things up for
| Google et al considering she has been pushing this regulation at
| their behest with fervour. That will probably take the form of
| even further prostration of Europe to US big tech.
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