Scans will always be profitable. The difference between scanning someone in real life and scamming them via the internet isn’t all the much different.
Scammers use phone calls to scan people too. Are you suggesting we tap and monitor everyone’s phones for keywords?
The thing about privacy is that you seem to be willing to let people or organisations (that we can’t prove have our best interest at heart) violate people’s privacy in order to get the result you want. And there’s no proof that you will get that result.
Meanwhile someone who’s human has to make the determination that something is criminal or something is CP and that means we have to pay people to comb through all that data.
That’s very taxing on the individuals involved. It does harm to them.
Now I’m sure you’ll say something about expectation of privacy when submitting anything to the web. But people do have the expectation of privacy online. Take a look at people who are deliberately de-googling or up in arms about web sites collecting their data to target them with ads.
danhakimi@kbin.social 8 months ago
It is! People are wary of scams, it's not worth wasting an hour trying to scam one random person anymore. Spending a few hours trying to spam millions of people is a worthwhile use of a scammer's time, especially when there's no risk of being banned or caught.
That's not a solution I would pose for that problem, no, but there are laws in place intended to reduce spam calling, and many, many tech companies are proposing many, many solutions for that, and nobody is saying "oh no, what if you accidentally classify an innocent telemarketing-spammer as a scammer?" Good riddance.
I think people should use e2ee-enabled chat services if they expect privacy. Telegram users don't bother turning on secret chats because they lack all of the features that make people want to use telegram. I think Whatsapp users have a much more reasonable expectation of privacy, and Whatsapp still goes through efforts to reduce spam and misinformation on its platform. I think Matrix users have a more reasonable expectation of privacy (since encryption is on by default, and can be used in group chats and spaces and on calls and with every other matrix feature), but Matrix servers still do not federate with Al Qaeda rocket.chat servers, because they know better.
Telegram has to. It can afford to. I'll remind you that I did not set criminality as the bar.
Now think of what it does to the rest of the people who have to see it. If you can pay one person to willingly review content for child porn that couldn't be identified in advance so a million others don't have to see it, is that really the worst thing?
Data collection feels very different to me, but you're specifically sending your messages to Telegram. Like, Google scanning my emails is something I have trouble objecting to (although I object to the use of that information for ad-related purposes, of course).
By "de-googling," do you mean the whole "right to be forgotten" thing? I think that's nonsense, clearly at odds with the right to remember, and largely used by wealthy assholes to deflect attention from shitty things they did.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You object to the business model of the free service you subscribe to? That’s what you basically said. I want to use Google’s free email service. I agreed to allow them to collect my data and target me with ads as is their business model. But I object to them collecting my data to target me with ads. That doesn’t make any sense.
Spear fishing and so on are still a thing. Scams via regular SMS messages? Still a thing. It absolutely is profitable to target one person depending on how you target them and what you get in return. These scams and the businesses and companies that fight them are constantly playing whack a mole. They wouldn’t bother to continue trying to scam via email and SMS if it wasn’t profitable still.
Saying Telegram has to monitor their users and the content sent via the service and suggesting that they should (as an extension of that) violate the privacy of the users to monitor them all for illegal activity because they have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” is an interesting take. Even the police are supposed to subpoena your texts if they can show reasonable cause.
You’re throwing reasonable cause out the window. If it’s an app for private messaging the people who use it have the expectation that their messages are private. This isn’t a forum we’re talking about. It’s not twitch. They are sending messages to a specific recipient. They aren’t making a public post on Facebook.
danhakimi@kbin.social 8 months ago
Telegram is incredibly aware of Hamas's channels and still doesn't feel like doing anything about it: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/25/23931710/telegram-android-block-hamas-channels-google-play-guidelines-war-israel
atrielienz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
And if Hamas is violating their TOS while using the service, then they should do something about it. In the same way that Google blocks what scammers it can find who are using google voice numbers to scam people. But what you are suggesting isn’t that they take action against people or organisations that are violating the TOS or using the service to break the law.
You are suggesting they essentially listen in on every conversation or message sent on the service to find people breaking the law or violating the TOS. That’s not the same thing.
HarkMahlberg@kbin.social 8 months ago
I'm a mixed bag of agree and disagree on these points but I'm only going to point out that the "De-Googling" trend doesn't really have anything to do with the right to be forgotten. It has more to do with enshittification - Google shutting down services, making their current services harder to use, charging money for what used to be free services, charging more money for already paid services, adding ads, etc etc.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 8 months ago
To hear people on the privacy subreddits and even the privacy Lemmy communities tell it, it’s absolutely about the data these companies are collecting. I’ll grant you it’s about what the companies are perceived to be doing with the data the collect (serving ads), but I don’t think I personally ever made the point that op did (that it was about right to be forgotten).
Either way, I think op may have missed my point. As technology evolves people will find new ways to abuse it. And there’s a level of privacy people should have the expectation of, and our privacy laws don’t do enough as it is. Op is really suggesting that we further violate everyone’s privacy in the name of protecting them and they don’t want to hear that it’s a bad idea or one where we would have to put our trust in a company or companies to apply this monitoring.
They also don’t seem to want to hear about the burn out rate of people tasked with moderating content and validating that that content is against TOS or breaks the law. Having humans trawl communities or even just messaging app text data for CP and scams is bound to have a detrimental effect.
danhakimi@kbin.social 8 months ago
Sure. But I can't blame them for collecting data that I literally decide to send them for no reason but my own, I can only blame them for using that data in a shitty way.
If I post something on Instagram, I know that they're collecting the photo I post, that's how posting works, that's not the issue. The issue comes if they try scanning peoples' faces to invade their privacy, or build an advertising profile about me. Sending unencrypted chat messages is not that different.
If I download Whatsapp, and I enable the contacts permission, and it uploads all of the Contacts data on my phone, that's super not okay, because I never wanted to give them that data in the first place, they just jacked it.(I disable contacts permission for whatsapp on my phone, but most users would never know that data gets uploaded to begin with.
danhakimi@kbin.social 8 months ago
Ohhhhh that de-Googling. Yeah, I've done a bit of that, disabled the Google app on my phone entirely since Firefox does its job better, but I'm on Android and doing all that setup every time I get a new phone is just a headache.