from Hacker News

Protecting Children's Safety Requires End-to-End Encryption

by Sami_Lehtinen on 6/20/24, 6:37 AM with 81 comments

• by CJefferson on 6/20/24, 7:19 AM

  I'm happy to have a discussion about this, but I don't buy that end-to-end encryption will, overall, increase children's safety. I'm happy to see strong evidence one way of the other, but this article is very one-sided.

  Child grooming on the internet is a huge problem, and I suspect (again, happy to see evidence against it) it's better to allow scanning of children's communications, rather than ensuring their communication with whoever they are talking to is end-to-end encrypted.

  I don't think it's reasonable to make this the parent's responsibility, when basically the whole world is internet connected, and those parents are fighting against multi-billion dollar international corporations, who dedicate huge teams of highly paid people to ensuring children get addicted to their platforms. Looking at the children in my life, it's very hard to keep them off social media, even if you don't give them devices they will just use their friend's, or devices at school.

• by andrewstuart on 6/20/24, 7:57 AM

  Please, not the "we're protecting the children".

  It always starts with "we're protecting the children".

  It always ends with "we're censoring the Internet".

• by teekert on 6/20/24, 7:28 AM

  I find the argument a bit weak because client side scanning is not the same as creating a central store for all send images. I do indeed find it very concerning that flagged content will eventually be looked at by a human, and said human may be a criminal, or said human and her computers will indeed be the target of hackers looking to extort.

  Would be nice if this scenario would first play out for a politician that helped establish Chat Control.

• by TrackerFF on 6/20/24, 7:38 AM

  Not related to encryption, but "child safety" seems to be a really popular subject for ushering in all kinds of overreaching policies.

  Encrypted communications? Think of the children.

  Legalizing cannabis? Think of the children.

  LGBTQ+ rights? Think of the children.

  Non-western immigrants? Think of the children.

  Non-western social media becoming too popular? Think of the children.

  etc.

  Sorry if this was political, but every time I see someone use "Think of the children" as their main argument, I can't help but to think there's some ulterior motives, and kids (who can't voice their opinion, or won't be heard / taken seriously if they could) are just being used as pawns - because who would want to argue against the safety of kids?

• by Taniwha on 6/20/24, 7:45 AM

  Really - today in NZ we have a political stoush where a serving politician has been chatting with young teenagers on snapchat - while there are lots of places where perfect security is important, with predatory adults around perhaps it's not the solution for protecting kids

• by egberts1 on 6/20/24, 7:22 AM

  You cannot say flat-out say that E2E alone must be maintained, you must make it harder for others to reach you, thru something done in-person/screen-only QR-code, Bluetooth'd contact vCard, ..., something that prevents drive-by spammers/perps/malicious actors from randomly attaching to an account.

  The key thing is to make distribution of account name harder:

  1. Send 256-char hash of your account 2. They tag your hash with a name of their own choice

  Disassociative of name to account gets maintained when used with a Signal protocol, which is what Signal app can do.

  Again, weak sauce on claiming E2E is alone essential for child's privacy.