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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   28718 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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The question of whether or not it's possible is leaps and bounds above my pay grade, but I suppose if the cryptobros are able to come up with things like a fully anonymous immutable ledger of transactions, using zero knowledge proofs and other voodoo, it shouldn't be surprising if someone manages to come up with a way to flag child porn without knowing what's exactly on the picture.

That said, even though you wanted to focus on the technical side, my mind always floats towards the question of "what even is privacy?". Europe has a strong core of "muh privacy" protectors, but as far as I can tell, they only care about individual privacy - as long as I'm not able to connect any particular data to any particular person, that's all fine by them. For my part I find "anonymous surveillance" even scarier, because all the creepy stuff happens on an aggregate level. I might as well face it, I'm not that unique, and if you've seen one traditionalist conspiracist schizo, you've seen them all. So governments and megacorps being able to collect all they data on trad-schizos they want, """"anonymously"""", doesn't really bring me much comfort. As time goes by they'll probably know me better then I'll know myself, and if there's any way to nope out of that, I will.

Now, does that justify lying about whether or not it's technically possible to flag child porn? I'll go with a "no". It has the same energy as those folks coming up with a new species to stop the construction of a dam.

That said, even though you wanted to focus on the technical side, my mind always floats towards the question of "what even is privacy?".

Indeed. Something like " scanning photos using an algorithm for a set of well-known landmarks in a way that never exposes anything to a human" doesn't feel like it violates much. That's subjective tho.

The weird thing is that Facebook did the CSAM and other moderation using humans in a way that apparently looking at this stuff nonstop has serious psychological consequences. Life imitates South Park, I guess.

Anonymous this. Anonymous that. With sufficiently effort you can be deanonymized. What cell phone regularly visits your work, home and relatives? It's yours. Somewhere in aggregated """anonymized""" data is a perfectly obvious unique user number that is you.

I think the anonymous thing is kinda a joke. You don’t even need that much “anonymous” datapoints taken together to figure out who someone is. The time and location where you post, the people you follow, the exact configuration of your browser, put enough details together and anyone with access can find you pretty easily.

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