> So: where are the proposals for a better solution?
Better policing and child protective services to catch child abuse at the root, instead of panicking about the digital files it produces? If you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed that real-world surveillance has massively increased, which should enable the police to catch predators more easily. Why count only privacy-betraying technology as a "solution", while ignoring the rise of police and surveillance capabilities?
Edit as reply because two downvotes means I am "posting too fast, please slow down" (thank you for respecting me enough to tell me when I can resume posting /s):
> How do you police people reaching out to children via messaging with sexual content?
First, this is one small element of child abuse - you want to prevent child rape, merely being exposed to sexual content is nowhere near severe enough to merit such serious privacy invasion. To prevent the actual abuse, one could use the near-omnipresent facial recognition cameras, license plate readers, messaging metadata, to find when a stranger is messaging or stalking a child, DNA evidence after the fact that is a deterrent to other offenders, phone location data, etc. etc. At first I thought I didn't have to spell this out.
Second, to answer your question: very easily. With parental controls, a decades old technology that is compatible with privacy and open-source. The parent can be the admin of the child's devices, and have access to their otherwise encrypted messages. There is no need to delegate surveillance (of everyone, not just children) to governments and corporations, when we have such a simple, obvious, already existing solution. It frankly boggles the mind how one could overlook it, especially compared to how technically complex Apple's approach is. Does the mention of child abuse simply cause one's thinking to shut down, and accept as gospel anything Apple or the government says, without applying the smallest bit of scrutiny?
You have overlooked that the system for protecting minors from sexual messaging /is/ the parental controls you wish it was, and is /not/ the serious privacy invasion you think it is. It is on-device only, it only alerts the parents, in the condition that the parents enable it and the child continues past a warning informing them that their parent will find out if they continue.
> "The parent can be the admin of the child's devices, and have access to their otherwise encrypted messages."
Apple have done even better - the parent doesn't get access to all their messages (at least not as part of this system).
This is not the same system as the photo-scanning and authority-alerting one.
How do you police people reaching out to children via messaging with sexual content?
> Why count only privacy-betraying technology as a "solution", while ignoring the rise of police and surveillance capabilities?
I don’t. But if your solution is ‘just police more’, you need to explain how the police should detect people who are grooming children by sending images to them.
Better policing and child protective services to catch child abuse at the root, instead of panicking about the digital files it produces? If you'd been paying attention, you'd have noticed that real-world surveillance has massively increased, which should enable the police to catch predators more easily. Why count only privacy-betraying technology as a "solution", while ignoring the rise of police and surveillance capabilities?
Edit as reply because two downvotes means I am "posting too fast, please slow down" (thank you for respecting me enough to tell me when I can resume posting /s):
> How do you police people reaching out to children via messaging with sexual content?
First, this is one small element of child abuse - you want to prevent child rape, merely being exposed to sexual content is nowhere near severe enough to merit such serious privacy invasion. To prevent the actual abuse, one could use the near-omnipresent facial recognition cameras, license plate readers, messaging metadata, to find when a stranger is messaging or stalking a child, DNA evidence after the fact that is a deterrent to other offenders, phone location data, etc. etc. At first I thought I didn't have to spell this out.
Second, to answer your question: very easily. With parental controls, a decades old technology that is compatible with privacy and open-source. The parent can be the admin of the child's devices, and have access to their otherwise encrypted messages. There is no need to delegate surveillance (of everyone, not just children) to governments and corporations, when we have such a simple, obvious, already existing solution. It frankly boggles the mind how one could overlook it, especially compared to how technically complex Apple's approach is. Does the mention of child abuse simply cause one's thinking to shut down, and accept as gospel anything Apple or the government says, without applying the smallest bit of scrutiny?