You raise a good point, and it’s that Facebook could be doing this for benevolent reasons. But on the flip side, let’s say they are pressured by a government who wants to know about users messaging each other about abortion.
What would prevent them from being pressured into turning their client-side abuse material scanning into politically motivated client-side scanning with something as simple as a “red flag word” list update, which could be pushed exclusively to users in a particular country or state?
Maybe. To me, it looks like social media companies operate total impunity, either not getting caught at all, or getting mostly ignored if they do get caught. Between PRISM and the whistleblowing bombshell, you’d figure the company wouldn’t be the biggest social network in existence, but Facebook persists.
You raise a good point, and it’s that Facebook could be doing this for benevolent reasons. But on the flip side, let’s say they are pressured by a government who wants to know about users messaging each other about abortion.
What would prevent them from being pressured into turning their client-side abuse material scanning into politically motivated client-side scanning with something as simple as a “red flag word” list update, which could be pushed exclusively to users in a particular country or state?
Nothing technically would prevent that, but eventually that evidence would end up in public court and the ruse would be up.
Maybe. To me, it looks like social media companies operate total impunity, either not getting caught at all, or getting mostly ignored if they do get caught. Between PRISM and the whistleblowing bombshell, you’d figure the company wouldn’t be the biggest social network in existence, but Facebook persists.