Priti Patel accuses Facebook of putting profit before children’s safety
It’s a business, and?
The Home Secretary will take the unusual step of singling out Facebook for its “unacceptable” plans to encrypt all messages, which she says will hamper law enforcement agencies’ ability to prevent “abhorrent” online child abuse.
Facebook produces something that – it thinks – its billions of consenting adult users would like, end to end encryption. The person in charge of the domestic spy agency, the spy agency which would much prefer end to end encryption not be used, cannot say that a business should not provide what people desire. But they can make some excuse.
Won’t someone think of the children?
Eventually she’ll get round to using the full set of “threats”, drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles, while carefully ignoring the fact that without end to end encryption the banking system would be a sitting duck.
The asian rape gangs are still out there Priti, if you seriously wanted to do something about “abhorrent” child abuse. Just saying.
Think of the Children.. Don’t let them on damn Facebook ( or any other Social Media ) to begin with…
Easy solution. Does require this thing called “parenting” though…
Important note: teenagers, while technically “children”, will rebel and do Silly Things they might regret later. Comes with Youf. Comes with the harsh lesson that Actions have Consequences.
Which concept decent Parenting would have instilled in them anyway..
Well, there’s “end to end”, and then there’s privacy. Facebook is quite rightly encrypting all communications from it’s messenger application at each end of conversations. However, FB still controls the code for the application, and if it was so minded it could intercept conversations within the application itself: this is what it wants to do with Whatsapp. All those ads don’t monetise themselves, you know! I suspect Priti is angling for such backend access, which is why we see so much kerfuffle…
Roué le Jour
+100
There’s the app, the data transmission and the storage of the data itself. This is just the in transit life, so the equivalent of licking the envelope and sealing it. Plenty of other opportunities for security and police to ‘think of the children’ and access the information.