(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]
essay – Dropsafe
2023-12
Your choice of answers are pretty straightforward:
No, I do not want 1.3 billion human beings to have better data security and better privacy Yes, I want 1.3 billion human beings to have better data security and better privacy Yes, but not like this, not at this huge and emotional cost, not at this risk…
So here’s 1 million people. It’s a chickpea on a plate, just the one. Perhaps that’s the million people who you feel are at most risk from other people getting better privacy and data security. Perhaps you envision a few million of them, globally?
Now here’s the approximate population of Australia at 26 (perhaps 27) chickpeas:
…and here is the UK at 67 chickpeas:
Now: of these two national populations, not all of them (perhaps half, to be absurdly generous) are actually using Facebook Messenger; in truth probably more of them are using WhatsApp which is already end-to-end encrypted.
So how many people, globally, actually use Facebook Messenger? Well, I sampled 100 chickpeas and weighted them out as approximately 36,75g using a coffee-nerd scale; then I scaled that mass up and calculated that 1300 chickpeas is approximately 477.75g, which approximately looks like this:
Each chickpea is 1 million people who now have better security and data privacy, and for certain uses Messenger. It’s a heavily-loaded plateful of people who are less likely to have old messages exfiltrated by hackers, credit-card details stolen, medical information copied, passport-images cloned, and so forth.
It’s strange, but yes, people do share that sort of information over Messenger.
If you’ve gotten this far then either you are in the “yes” or the “yes, but…” camp; but the big problem is that all of the “but we want to scan people’s messages for badness!”—codicils, the people who opine that “we are losing the ability to surveil for bad people”… yes, that is literally the point.
The thing that you are mourning the loss of, was always the weakness that prevented people having desirable privacy.
BUT THE REPORTS WILL DECLINE!
NCMEC in particular is mourning that the numbers of “reports” of “hits” against their database of “PhotoDNA hashes” will drop; what they are less forthcoming about is that the vast majority of that number are meaningless duplicates posted by people who don’t represent a threat to children.
However: at the moment NCMEC have a convenient guaranteed-ever-increasing[1] scary number of reports to wave in front of politicians in order to demand funding for their (yes, it’s true, valuable) work. Given that Meta’s (a) growth and (b) diligence in reporting (as they are legally obligated) literally every PhotoDNA match, NCMEC can treat their “number of reports” metric as a magical money tree.
“Tech enables wickedness, help us punish it!”
No wonder that NCMEC are worried that part of that statistic is going to be pruned; the next risk is that someone might ask them to account for, or at least sample, the number of children who are saved globally by their effort each year. It would be interesting to know how many chickpeas millions of children are being saved for the cost to privacy that they wish to impose on a plateful of people.
In the meantime: we will use other methods to find actual chickpeas who are at actual risk, and also empower and encourage them to actively report suspicions and harms; because that’s the real goal, yes? To protect children?
[1] Because N = f(userbase), and Meta’s userbase is growing, therefore N is growing
[END]
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