One of the most dangerous narratives coming out of the pro-encryption camp right now is that metadata surveillance (by any other name) can be a solution to "online harms" in lieu of banning or restricting access to end-to-end encryption.

Ceding ground that is already lost.
Let us not blatantly ignore the fact that governments and corporations already conduct vast, intrusive metadata surveillance campaigns - and have done for decades.

Metadata surveillance is the gross, default state of the modern world.
The real solution to online harms rests in more anonymity, more encryption, more consensual communication and more decentralization of power.
We @OpenPriv are building @cwtch_im, a truly decentralized and surveillance resistant application.

If you want to actually start proactively defending privacy instead of reacting to every fresh legislative hell, then come help us.

openprivacy.ca/donate/

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More from @SarahJamieLewis

24 Oct
It's been 7 days, and now we have some ridiculous line about encryption making espionage easier. The pace is really heating up.
I'm not sure people really understand this, so I'm going to say this again:

The current argument by the anti-encryption side is that the threat of state violence should be used to prevent the offering of math-as-a-service.
I will grant that there are legitimate sounding arguments that may prompt someone to consider pointing weapons at anyone who dares to carry out the dark arts of arithmetic but I would hope that by now most would have outgrown such childish notions of how the world aught to work.
Read 10 tweets
27 Sep
Why Web 3.0 Matters (2007)
We are at least on Web 7.0 by now and it is all still terrible.
Remember when "mashups" were a thing? That was a dark time.
Read 8 tweets
14 Sep
This is cool, earlier this year I looked into the privacy of FMD (by @gabrie_beck et al) including simulations of attacks on realistic datasets.

Now, @Istvan_A_Seres et al have performed their own analysis and, in addition, have shown attack improvements on those same datasets.
You can find my original dive into those datasets as part of the book I put together for fuzzytags (a rust implementation of FMD)

docs.openprivacy.ca/fuzzytags-book…
The attack improvements come from considering temporal relationships (the probability of receiving messages over a given threshold in a period of time) instead of just over the lifetime of the system.

This can be devastating if false positive rates are poorly selected.
Read 12 tweets
18 Aug
Both these images have NeuralHash: 1e986d5d29ed011a579bfdea

Just a reminder that visually similar images are not necessarily semantically similar images.
Love playing games like "Are these, technically, semantically similar images"?

All these images have NeuralHash: ba9f4edd1233a856784b2dc4
Hashes generated using the instructions / script found here: github.com/AsuharietYgvar…
Read 18 tweets
16 Aug
Revisiting first impressions of the Apple PSI system in light of the new threat model.

pseudorandom.resistant.tech/ftpsi-paramete…
I think the main takeaway is that there hasn't been enough push back and that this now seems depressingly inevitable.

I expect we will see more calls for surveillance like this in the coming months heavily remixed into the ongoing "online harms" narrative.
Without a strong stance from other tech companies, in particular device manufacturers and OS developers, we will look back on the last few weeks as the beginning of the end of generally available consumer devices that don't conduct constant algorithmic surveillance.
Read 5 tweets
13 Aug
Apple have given some interviews today where they explicitly state that the threshold t=30.

Which means the false acceptance rate is likely an order of magnitude *more* that I calculated in this article.
Someone asked me on a reddit thread the other day what value t would have to be if NeuralHash had a similar false acceptance rate to other perceptual hashes and I ball parked it at between 20-60...so yeah.
Some quick calculations with the new numbers:

3-4 photos/day: 1 match every 286 days.
50 photos/day: 1 match every 20 days.
Read 17 tweets

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