A tyrannical government is far more dangerous to people, including children than your regular criminal. Ironically, by giving the state too much power and therefore increasing the symptoms of corruption, we allow the same sort of crimes to be practiced by corrupt state officials with little means for people enact accountability. China, the country with the most mass-surveillance in the world has huge problems with sex trafficking, rape and prostitution. And you guessed it, state officials are involved. All these cameras and this online surveillance didn’t make a dent to the social rot that China is suffering from. In fact, this moral (/s) state is running concentration camps, and is justifying it.
Mass-surveillance is a form of power-transfer from the majority of people to a select few. When you, as individuals, as families, as communities, as the people lack power, you’ll be less able to prevent your children from falling prey to government officials. Instead of facing a weak outcast, you’re facing an individual that’s linked to your government.
> This spying attack on our private messages and photos by error-prone algorithms is a giant step towards a Chinese-style surveillance state.
Well said. I’d like to add that even if the system was free from errors, it’s terrible.
I wish this article had more punch. I'm Belgian myself. Name and shame the parties that are pushing this initiative.
Usually these parties have a European level, some political "brotherhood" that also exist in the Netherlands.
As is, it just is meaningless fist waving in the direction of Belgium. It's a shame because I think we have so many like minded people in both the Netherlands and Belgium, that making this a national issue, "look at those Belgians" loses us (those who care for freedom of speech) on both sides.
Very interesting: that proposal from some belgian part effectively destroys the ability for people (selectively speaking) to use communication technologies. If people could not use "Signal and similar", still supposed to radically avoid any profiling product, they would have to abandon IP-based telephony and messaging altogether.
Well said. If there's no true freedom of speech, we've lost everything.
The last two years offered already a glimpse... Now look at China. It's mind blowing. Poor people.
As time goes on, China will appear less authoritarian, and more desirable to people with a certain (warped one I won't name) ideology, as it continues towards its logical conclusion.
China's one child policy now seems "reasonable"
Their mass surveillance is almost desired now, with our new "Ministry of Truth"
Jail time for speaking out against the government -- something I saw plenty of people vouching for when dissenting views about the pandemic were offered up.
Re-education camps for speaking out against teaching certain ideologies and concepts to young children are almost implicitly implied.
There's more, but it's clear this is where we are headed. The slippery slope isn't a fallacy, and 1984 was a prediction.
The most shocking thing for me is this is happening after the events of late Feburary; you know, when a dictatorship which started the biggest land war since WWII silenced all internal dissidents using their over-encroaching surveillance network. How does an organization shuffling untolds amount of resources into protecting a nascent democracy that they really didn't care too much about six months ago come to the conclusion that, yes, we do need to model our web around murderous dictatorships.
The country with most mass-surveillance in the world is the US, not China. It’s also the country with the highest percentage of incarcerated (with a very evident racial bias), one with much worse moral problems (from Christian fundamentalists restricting basic human rights like bodily freedom, to legalized state corruption which allows companies to essentially buy legal regulations), state-mandated slavery (private prisons), a vastly dysfunctional legal system, police routinely murdering people, healthcare statistics typical for some third world countries, regular school shootings, and privately owned concentration camps for politically incorrect youth.
Sure, China is far from perfect. But the post above is pure propaganda, aligned with general activity of this “mildmotive” account here: American right-wing political shilling.
It's interesting how EU regulators build good will through stunts like mandating USB-C or forcing open the App Store and GDPR protections and then turn around and do stuff like this.
Looks like they listen more to engineers, except when doing that can touch their power. Not that surprising: powerful corrupt politicians are of the same kind, no matter their nationality.
Any good cartoonist out there that would make the EU version of this masterpiece?
It all seems pretty consistent to me. The EU commission wants more power for itself and less autonomy for companies, particularly tech giants, having failed to create any of its own.
I think the people who support things like mandating USB-C, forcing open the App Store, and GDPR are misguided at best. These are significant transfers of power from the (mostly) organic and consensual realm of individuals and businesses to the coercive realm of state force. You can always buy an android phone (with USB-C) and use GrapheneOS, F-droid, Tutanota, Brave Search, Odysee, Mastodon, Matrix, etc. to get most of what you want without asking unaccountable bureaucracies to enforce your will on everyone else by the threat of violence.
I have a special hatred for GDPR for contributing to balkanization of the internet, and for the annoying cookie warnings that sometimes breaks sites when you disable cookies at the browser level. The only way GDPR actually improves my privacy is by forcing me to use a VPN to access some sites.
Actually you can use it to take down personal information, sort of like DMCA is used for copyrighted content.
Pretty much any website threatened with GDPR will remove your photos/phone number/email/whatever, they're not worth the fine. You could then still report them tbh (it has to be reported to whatever enforcement agency in the country it's hosted in, though, which only exist in the EU and are a pain to deal with).
These are from companies who are too lazy to properly comply with the GDPR, or worse, plainly illegal. It's not the fault of the GDPR that many companies choose not to be compliant. (The national regulators should absolutely clamp down harder on these non-compliant cookie popups)
When you make a law, you are responsible for the consequences of that law. It's like when the British colonial authorities inadvertently incentivized the breading of cobras, and how modern drug warriors push users to more dangerous substances. You are legislating reality, not a fantasy world where you have total control.
No, the worst part is people running to the comments section on a real, legitimate issue and airing their general conspiracy theories and misunderstandings about the world as if they’re factual. It dilutes the point when you fill the room with noise like this, so you’re really having the opposite effect than you think and playing directly into the goals of the people who fed you that horseshit.
I'd never heard the phrase child groomers until a couple months ago and now it's everywhere. Same with CRT a few months before that. People talk about "liberal media" but nothing holds a candle to the power of right wing media to manufacture constant outrages over and over again. They've elevated Two Minutes Hate to an art form.
A tyrannical government is far more dangerous to people, including children than your regular criminal. Ironically, by giving the state too much power and therefore increasing the symptoms of corruption, we allow the same sort of crimes to be practiced by corrupt state officials with little means for people enact accountability. China, the country with the most mass-surveillance in the world has huge problems with sex trafficking, rape and prostitution. And you guessed it, state officials are involved. All these cameras and this online surveillance didn’t make a dent to the social rot that China is suffering from. In fact, this moral (/s) state is running concentration camps, and is justifying it.
Mass-surveillance is a form of power-transfer from the majority of people to a select few. When you, as individuals, as families, as communities, as the people lack power, you’ll be less able to prevent your children from falling prey to government officials. Instead of facing a weak outcast, you’re facing an individual that’s linked to your government.
> This spying attack on our private messages and photos by error-prone algorithms is a giant step towards a Chinese-style surveillance state.
Well said. I’d like to add that even if the system was free from errors, it’s terrible.