Child safety group Heat Initiative plans to launch a campaign pressing Apple on child sexual abuse material scanning and user reporting. The company issued a rare, detailed response on Thursday.
Can we please start ignoring these groups? “The Children” are their only concern no matter how it might negatively affect anyone else. Kids who are abused or trafficked should be helped, but that’s not the only issue we have right now and it’s definitely not more important than the effects eroding privacy would have for people and groups around the world. But these “wHaT aBoUt ThE cHiLdReN?!” groups really don’t care - as long as their concerns are addressed everyone else can go fuck themselves. Plus, lots of these groups are primarily staffed and run by former or current LEO who would like to see less privacy anyways.
Almost none of these groups actually care about the kids. Most of them actively support policies that are proven to enable/cause more abuse because it feels like they're hurting the bad guys. As a childhood survivor of a bunch of awful shit that I don't want to get into specifics on, I've never seen a single "for the children" group advocate anything that wouldn't have caused more trauma for me when I was younger. There's no care about fixing problems and preventing childhood trauma/abuse, just care about asserting control and investing in what "feels good": retributive justice (that's more likely to cause recidivism) against one single specific style of abuser while ignoring others (and the survivors) entirely.
This is more about feeling good (and, for some, more authoritarian control) than about actually helping the issue of child abuse.
Also I highly suspect groups like this one in particular are funded or even founded by government organizations with a high interest in accessing all your data.
Completely agree. They should follow the Jeffrey Epstein’s link and networks if they have the balls. You don’t need to scan all people’s phone on earth. Well, it includes high profile people, so good luck with that.