For months, Mullvad has been papering San Francisco with smart and cheeky ads, like "Mass surveillance is made by machine men with machine hearts".
I admire that they're saying this, and wish other VPN companies would do similar public relations to highlight the risks of ad targeting.
Tbh, I'm a customer. Before Mullvad, I used PIA.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/advertising-that-targets-everyon...
> And then politicians in Brussels wanted to exempt themselves from the scanning.
> And then?
> And then the European Parliament, in an almost historic consensus, voted against the proposal and called Chat Control nothing but mass surveillance. As one of the members of the parliament said: “The Commission wasn’t focusing on protecting children but wanted mass surveillance.”
As in Tom and Jerry: "This shouldn't happen to a dog, said dogs".
Or in Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
and
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
I've used them for years. They're likely the most private VPN, but I still can't recommend them. Their IPs are constantly blocked, and with few servers, switching doesn't help (this was already an issue long before I was a customer). Plus, their macOS app has tons of issues.
I don't think there is a way around the fact that governments will always want at least "lawful intercept" (with warrants) capabilities.
It's a noble fight trying to get E2EE be compatible with the law. But I think some perspective for privacy advocates is due. People don't want freedom and privacy at the cost of their own security. We shouldn't have to choose, but if nothing else, the government has one most important role, and that is not safeguarding freedoms, but ensuring the safety of its people.
No government, no matter how free or wealthy can abdicate its role in securing its people. There must be a solution to fight harmful (not neccesarily illegal) content incorporated into secure messaging solutions. I'm not arguing for backdoors in this post, but even things like Apple's CSAM scanning approach are met with fierce resistance from the privacy advocate community.
This stance that "No, we can't have any solutions, leave E2EE alone" is not a practical stance.
Speaking purely as a citizen, if you're telling me "you will lose civil liberties and democracy, if you let governments reduce cp content", my response would be "what's the hold up?". Even if governments are just using that as an excuse. As someone slightly familiar with the topic, of course I wouldn't want to trade my liberties and freedoms, but is anyone working on a solution? are there working groups? Why did Apple get so much resistance, but there are no opensource solutions?
There are solutions for anonymous payments using homomorphic encryption. Things like Zcash and Monero exist. But you're telling me privacy preserving solutions to combat illicit content are impossible? My problem is with the impossible part. Are there researchers working to make this happen using differential privacy or some other solution? How can I help? Let's talk about solutions.
If your position is that governments (who represent us,voters) should accept the status quo, and just let their people suffer injustice, I don't think I can support that.
Mullvad is also in for a rude awakening. If criminals use Tor or VPNs, those will also face a ban. We need to give governments solutions that lets them do what they claim they want to do (protect the public from victimization) while preserving privacy to avoid a very real dystopia.
Freedoms and liberties must not come at the cost of injustice. And as i argued elsewhere on HN, in the end, ignoring ongoing injustice will result in even less freedoms and liberties. If there was a pluralistic referendum in the EU over chat control, I would be surprised if the result isn't a law that is even far worse than chat control.
EDIT: Here is one idea I had: Sign images/video with hardware-secured chips (camera sensor or GPU?) that is traceable to the device. When images are further processed/edited, then they will be subject to differential-privacy scanning. This can also combat deepfakes, if image authenticity can be proven by the device that took the image.
I wonder how many people actually believe this is for the kids and not for population control.
The bad people can use encrypted services just like they use guns, even if they are illegal. But then there's a spike in arrests for posting on social media if people express opinions or content contrary to preferred narratives.
Fortunately, there are people exposing NGO money flows and who favors them.Fortunately, the US keeps free speech sacred.
I'm immensely grateful to the founding fathers and their ability to come up with something so helpful so many years down the line