(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


A couple of weeks ago Meta/Facebook made the mistake of letting the UK Daily @Telegraph publish — and therefore editorialise & distort — their plans for end-to-end encryption. Today they’ve provided a

2021-12-01 20:20:55+00:00

From the perspective of “getting more end-to-end encrypted security into the hands of the greatest number of people”, November 20th was a train-wreck for Meta’s corporate communications.

What happened? The anti-encryption brigade seized upon a revised timeline described in a op-ed by Antigone Davis, re-presenting it simultaneously as backsliding whilst also crowing it as evidence of the “success” of their campaigns to hold back the tides of better information security and reduced data-loss threat profiles for everyone.

The media, predictably, lapped it up: anything that’s negative press about Facebook is fit to print; and I shall note here that there’s plenty of negative press that should be printed about Facebook, however this is not it.

Hopefully they will learn from this lesson, take a lower-key approach to delivery of functionality, and publish direct without intermediary editorialising. In the meantime, please read the attached posting. It will likewise be contentious — but without causing a media frenzy — because quotations like:

“Preventing abuse from happening in the first place is the best way to keep people safe…”

…present an existential threat to child-safety organisations that are funded by pursuing ever-inflating and statistically meaningless metrics like ‘reports of abusive imagery’ rather than more practical and humanitarian metrics like ‘distinct children newly found to be at risk / distinct children rescued / distinct paedophiles prosecuted, per 100,000 users.’

If we permit ‘reports of abusive imagery’ to remain the metric of our outrage then our numbers will never trend downwards even if every child is saved; and society will suffer as a result of what we allow — or demand — in the name of that never-decreasing number.
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/15610
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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