Your location is already known to your mobile operator, to your phone OS manufacturer, to various social media services, and more, including the government/law enforcement on request (maybe, or they have permanent access, who knows).
Any time you buy stuff with a debit/credit card, the details of that transaction is known to your bank, your card provider, tax authorities, including where you bought stuff, and by request, authorities
Money that goes into your bank account is also known by your bank (obviously), by tax authorities, and by request, authorities.
Your ISP knows who you talk to, and can easily log metadata about which sites you visit, even if you use a secure DNS, and in most countries, authorities can request (metadata) logging from your ISP, which you'll never even notice.
During COVID, health authorities started analyzing sewage to estimate how much the virus had spread in various communities, and some places they were down to street level accuracy. Obviously that gets a lot more diffuse on Manhattan than some rural city with 400 people in it, but you pretty much can't fart without anyone knowing it.
We are already under constant surveillance, whether we like it or not. I don't mind as much as long as it's used retroactively, but the ChatControl proposition would be proactive instead. It would scan your texts and report if it found something "suspicious", with the caveat that you as a user don't know what's suspicious today (or tomorrow). The list isn't public, and you wouldn't get notified that someone had called an adult, not until someone comes knocking on your door.
Their plan is/was to use AI, and we all know that ChatGPT never gets confused about anything, so that sounds like a great and ultra consistent plan. Most things require context. I might be angry because some kids gave me hard time, and write "fuck all children" to someone, but the anger isn't evident in the message, only the literal message, which I agree might be interpreted as something else (deliberately). This would then (probably) result in a notification for human review, a task that would fall to the operator of said service, so now Meta, Google or whomever has a legal justification for reading my messages looking for context, and I can't see any way that could go wrong. The other option was for law enforcement to read the messages, and while they're probably a bit more trustworthy in terms of privacy, I doubt we want to staff up our law enforcement offices by a factor 10 to read peoples messages.
The list could also be updated behind your back, so for totalitarian wannabe regimes, it could be used to pinpoint exactly who is organizing all those darned protests.
Your location is already known to your mobile operator, to your phone OS manufacturer, to various social media services, and more, including the government/law enforcement on request (maybe, or they have permanent access, who knows).
Any time you buy stuff with a debit/credit card, the details of that transaction is known to your bank, your card provider, tax authorities, including where you bought stuff, and by request, authorities
Money that goes into your bank account is also known by your bank (obviously), by tax authorities, and by request, authorities.
Your ISP knows who you talk to, and can easily log metadata about which sites you visit, even if you use a secure DNS, and in most countries, authorities can request (metadata) logging from your ISP, which you'll never even notice.
During COVID, health authorities started analyzing sewage to estimate how much the virus had spread in various communities, and some places they were down to street level accuracy. Obviously that gets a lot more diffuse on Manhattan than some rural city with 400 people in it, but you pretty much can't fart without anyone knowing it.
We are already under constant surveillance, whether we like it or not. I don't mind as much as long as it's used retroactively, but the ChatControl proposition would be proactive instead. It would scan your texts and report if it found something "suspicious", with the caveat that you as a user don't know what's suspicious today (or tomorrow). The list isn't public, and you wouldn't get notified that someone had called an adult, not until someone comes knocking on your door.
Their plan is/was to use AI, and we all know that ChatGPT never gets confused about anything, so that sounds like a great and ultra consistent plan. Most things require context. I might be angry because some kids gave me hard time, and write "fuck all children" to someone, but the anger isn't evident in the message, only the literal message, which I agree might be interpreted as something else (deliberately). This would then (probably) result in a notification for human review, a task that would fall to the operator of said service, so now Meta, Google or whomever has a legal justification for reading my messages looking for context, and I can't see any way that could go wrong. The other option was for law enforcement to read the messages, and while they're probably a bit more trustworthy in terms of privacy, I doubt we want to staff up our law enforcement offices by a factor 10 to read peoples messages.
The list could also be updated behind your back, so for totalitarian wannabe regimes, it could be used to pinpoint exactly who is organizing all those darned protests.