If it's E2EE, no one except the sender and receiver know about this conversation. You want an MITM in this case to detect/block such things or at least keep record of what's going on for a subpoena.
I agree that every messaging platform in the world shouldn't be MITM'd, but every messaging platform doesn't need to be E2EE'd either.
I'm not saying no E2E messaging apps should exist, but maybe it doesn't need to for minors in social media apps. However, an alternative could be allowing the sharing of the encryption key with a parent so that there is the ability for someone to monitor messages.
Would it be a fair argument to say the police have a better opportunity to prevent crimes if they can enter your house without a warrant? People are paranoid about this sort of thing not because they think law enforcement is more effective when it is constrained. But how easily crimes can be prosecuted is only one dimension of safety.
> However, an alternative could be allowing the sharing of the encryption key with a parent
Right, but this is worlds apart from "sharing the encryption key with a private company", is it not?
Police can access your home with a warrant.
Police cannot access your E2EE DMs with a warrant.
> Police cannot access your E2EE DMs with a warrant.
They can and do, regularly. What they can't do is prevent you from deleting your DMs if you know you're under investigation and likely to be caught. But refusing to give up encryption keys and supiciously empty chat histories with a valid warrant is very good evidence of a crime in itself.
They also can't prevent you from flushing drugs down the toilet, but somehow people are still convicted for drug-related crimes all the time. So - yes, obviously, the police could prosecute more crimes if we gave up this protection. That's how limitations on police power work.
If you are pretty confident your under investigation then this is might be Obstruction of Justice and that's pretty illegal.
Uh, it absolutely isn't? WTF dystopian idea is this?
Well the kind of can if they nab your cell phone or other device that has a valid access token.
I think it's kind of analogous to the police getting at one's safe. You might have removed the contents before they got there but that's your prerogative.
I think this results in acceptable tradeoffs.
There is a program whereby police can generate hashes based on CSAM images, and then those hashes can be automatically compared against the hashes of uploaded photos on websites, so as to identify known CSAM images without any investigator having to actually view the CSAM and further infringe on the victim's privacy. But that only works vs. already known images, and can be done automatically whenever an image is uploaded, prior to encryption. The encryption doesn't prevent it.
Point being, disallowing encryption sacrifices a lot, while potentially not even being that useful for catching child abusers in practice.
I'm sure some offenders could be caught this way, but it would also cause so many problems itself.
We shouldn't make the world a worse place for every one because some parents can't take care of their children.
See also: That time the FBI took over a CSAM site and kept it running so they could nab a bunch of users.
What's more dangerous? CSAM on the internet? Or actual child predators running loose?
Pick your definition of safe.
Similarly in "traditional" media you may not want to discuss such private conversation on a radio broadcast. Perhaps you would rather discuss it on the phone or over snail mail as there is more of an expectation of privacy on those medium.
What does the "p" in "pm" stand for?
I will update above
Sure, they can fabricate some evidence and get access to your messages, in which case, valid point.
E2E makes political activists and anti-chinese dissidents safer, at the cost of making children less safe. Whether this is a worthwhile tradeoff is a political, not technical decision, but if we claim that there are any absolutes here, we just make sure that we'll never be taken seriously by anybody who matters.
What are children at risk of, when E2EE is not used?
Potential exposure to abusive adults.
> What are children at risk of, when E2EE is not used?
State-sanctioned violence.
and for tiktok's stance, I think they just don't want to get involved with the Chinese government related with encryption (and give false sense of privacy to user)