European Parliament approves mass surveillance of private communications

No backdoors in Holo, please. When can we start using a proper Holo chat and I can delete all my other apps?

From: Messaging and Chat Control – Patrick Breyer

How does this affect you?

  • All of your chat conversations and emails will be automatically searched for suspicious content. Nothing remains confidential or secret. There is no requirement of a court order or an initial suspicion for searching your messages. It occurs always and automatically.
  • If an algorithms classifies the content of a message as suspicious, your private or intimate photos may be viewed by staff and contractors of international corporations and police authorities. Also your private nude photos may be looked at by people not known to you, in whose hands your photos are not safe.
  • Flirts and sexting may be read by staff and contractors of international corporations and police authorities, because text recognition filters looking for “child grooming” frequently falsely flag intimate chats.
  • You can falsely be reported and investigated for allegedly disseminating child sexual exploitation material. Messaging and chat control algorithms are known to flag completely legal vacation photos of children on a beach, for example. According to Swiss federal police authorities, 86% of all machine-generated reports turn out to be without merit. 40% of all criminal investigation procedures initiated in Germany for “child pornography” target minors.
  • On your next trip overseas, you can expect big problems. Machine-generated reports on your communications may have been passed on to other countries, such as the USA, where there is no data privacy – with incalculable results.
  • Intelligence services and hackers may be able to spy on your private chats and emails. The door will be open for anyone with the technical means to read your messages if secure encryption is removed in order to be able to screen messages.
  • This is only the beginning. Once the technology for messaging and chat control has been established, it becomes very easy to use them for other purposes. And who guarantees that these incrimination machines will not be used in the future on our smart phones and laptops?
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Wonder the same thing.

Holochain is “an unenclosable carrier for communication”! Plus most Holo chat apps will be open-source (so forget about having backdoors in them that allow the government (the CIA, the FBI, etc) to spy on you unlike some other closed-source products like Bitlocker), not to mention the remote-call (capability) route for doing ultra-private conversations is as unbreakable as it can get. The boneheads passing these legislations are clueless. So in a sense, the days of the government spying on its citizens’ private life are over! Hail Holochain!

Hi @The-A-Man!

Apologies for not being clued up on the comms side of things - would appreciate a short description of what this is to save me going down lots of rabbit holes :wink:

“in a sense” is the operative phrase here IMHO - what I fear is they will say things like “well, holo.host, if you’re unable to follow our rules then we will shut you down”. If you’re unable to communicate using Holochain via the carriers/ISPs/etc. then the only way is to have a completely decentralised distributed network capacity, i.e. everyone connects via bluetooth/other completely independent connection. And that would take quite a while to build up.

Or perhaps my understanding of how the tech and network works isn’t up to scratch enough, I just feel the answer isn’t as simple as “Holochain fixes everything yay!”. Hopefully I’m wrong :wink:

Hi, @stephenpurkiss,

https://developer.holochain.org/concepts/8_calls_capabilities/


I think what is important to remember is that Holo is different from Holochain, and that to realize the Holochain dream, Holo is not necessary. So yeah, you’re right in that the authorities can target Holo, however that wouldn’t get them anything achieved; privacy-paranoid people like you and me will simply switch to hosting our source chains ourselves… [In fact, Holo has already said that they’d screen (h)apps themselves, and that they would not allow (h)apps that host explicit content to be hosted on Holo, so as to comply with the enemy (oops, I meant, the government).]


Oh yeah, I remember Eric (or someone else) talked about such a p2p self-served ISP to power Holochain… Can’t find the link though… Searched all my bookmarks… But I think after Holochain, Art & Eric might turn to design the framework of such a p2p ISP mesh network… I’d absolutely love to ditch the ISPs once and for all; I mean, who wouln’t, right? After all, what they provide is something we can provide ourselves, much like what Facebook provides (all its messaging and social services) is something that we can together provide to ourselves if given a framework to build the rules of the game upon… Holochain is that framework. Well then, the reasoning goes, it must theoretically be capable to replace ISPs as well… [I’d love the news headline: Holochain-powered ISP kills Starlink’s dream!]

Just speculations here… I really don’t have much knowledge about these lower-level side of the things… I have heard that Internet Protocol 6 is a good successor for TCP/IP, that wifi mesh networks, as they exist (at present), scale horribly, and a bunch of random things related to that… Perhaps @th1j5 has more detailed knowledge around these topics…

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Ah thanks, so sounds like I’m not too far off the mark in my thinking then. I do believe it will be an iterative process - they will ban things, tech will work its way round, etc. which is good as each time they do it the freedom increases and the tech gets better. Oh, if only they knew lol :wink:

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