[French media] said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.
Europe defending its citizens against the tech giants, I’m sure.
There’s a lot of really really dark shit on telegram that’s for sure, and it’s not like signal where they are just a provider. They do have control the content
I don’t recall CP/gore being readily available on those platforms, it gets reported/removed pretty quickly.
Safe harbour equivalent rules should apply, no? That is, the platforms should not be held liable as long as the platform does not permit for illegal activities on the platform, offer proper reporting mechanism, and documented workflows to investigate + act against reported activity.
It feels like a slippery slope to arrest people on grounds of suspicion (until proven otherwise) of lack of moderation.
Telegram does moderation of political content they don’t like.
Also Telegram does have means to control whatever they want.
And sometimes they also hide certain content from select regions.
Thus - if they make such decisions, then apparently CP and such are in their interest. Maybe to collect information for blackmail by some special services (Durov went to France from Baku, and Azerbaijan is friendly with Israel, and Mossad is even suspected of being connected to Epstein operation), maybe just for profit.
Do you have any links/sources about this? I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just interested
Why arrest him? Why not threaten to block the app in France or something like that?
And why only arrest him? Should the discord creators also be arrested for some shady channels? Should Elon Musk be arrested because twitter is the equivalent of fhe fifth circle of hell?
So they can make a very convincing case for a backdoor, in exchange for his release. And maybe some compensation for continued cooperation. Both come out winning and they get to claim nothing happened.
Government cyber security dealings as usual. or not. who knows?
It’s one of the most popular social media apps in Russia that is not banned or blocked. I would bet they already have a backdoor for the Russian police and intelligence agency…
That conspiracy theory is so dumb.
The government almost certainly doesn’t need a backdoor as telegram is almost completely unencrypted (only one-to-one channels can be but aren’t by default). The real (but more boring) conspiracy theory is that governments generally don’t mind Telegram because its willfully terrible security model allows them to keep an eye on terrorists and activists’ communications (I have a hard time believing that the NSA or even DGSE don’t have their own backdoors already).
However the EU does have laws mandating the moderation of said unencrypted messages, especially when it comes to CSAM, which Telegram is notoriously poorly moderated. It’s certainly reason enough to arrest and question this guy, at least until formal charges are brought or he walks free. Maybe there are additional political considerations, but there doesn’t have to be.
Also how would arresting this guy help with backdooring. He doesn’t have access to the source code. Whoever he calls to get that done is out of reach of the French police. He has no reason not to disable that backdoor as soon as he gets out of the EU. If he can be bought off he already has been (Crypto AG style except way lamer because no-one clever&important trusts Telegram), you don’t need to arrest someone to pay them. I’m no DSGSE bigwig but pressuring lower level engineers to backdoor their code seems like a 1000% more effective approach.
Clearest difference I can see is:
- people who act more in the interest of society and less in the interest of those in power get arrested
- people who help those in power tighten the leash on society (fuckerberg, muskrat, etc) get courted and don’t ever face consequences
In other words: A high profile person in tech being threatened with arrest / being arrested by western countries is a pretty good sign that they were not cooperating with our totalitarian overlords & providing us with ways to preserve our privacy.
And why only arrest him? Should the discord creators also be arrested for some shady channels? Should Elon Musk be arrested because twitter is the equivalent of fhe fifth circle of hell?
Stop asking question and go back to work
I don’t use Telegram because I don’t think it’s secure, but this is still bullshit.
TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram
I would vaguely imagine that they aren’t going to be very happy about the Threadiverse when they discover us. There’s no global moderator team to make moderate things.
There’s moderation per community and per server. There’s no “fediverse moderator”, of course, but I think you’re vaguely worrying for nothing.
It certainly is against the GDPR to federate with US instances. US law enforcement could get their hands on our data!
I’m not joking. It’s legally very questionable. It matters little if all the data is public.
Have you heard about that $1.3 billion fine that Meta got under the GDPR? That was for sending data to US servers where the US government can get to it. It was the highest fine ever under the GDPR and it happened because Meta complies with US law. For that matter, the option to embed images into posts is a violation, as well.
Unless you dox yourself what kind of personal information are instances sharing? On top of that stuff that isn’t due to the normal functioning of the site as a public message board?
What’s questionable is embedding images, lemm.ee mitigates that with proxying, but ultimately the web is the web and you can’t proxy the whole web. Clicking a link will still lead you somewhere else and if your browser pre-loads links then that’s up to you.
I’ll quote the definition from the GDPR:
‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
Little of the information that instance share is not personal. Identifiable is also very broad. It’s enough that it would be possible for someone with the right tools and access to other information to identify you. EG Your ISP could be subpoenaed to reveal the customer behind a dynamic IP-address, making it a personal datum.
It’s an extremely broad definition. If it wasn’t, tracking cookies would not be a big deal unless you had the real name of someone connected to the cookie ID.
ultimately the web is the web and you can’t proxy the whole web. Clicking a link will still lead you somewhere else and if your browser pre-loads links then that’s up to you.
That’s exactly what my first reaction was. But the law sees it differently. No one is required to use an ad-blocker, VPN, or know anything about the internet. When you make a website or something, it is up to you to make sure that no one’s rights are violated. In fairness, if it was otherwise, tracking pixels would be fine.
We’re not at a point yet, where outgoing links must come with a warning, but it would be safer. Someone is always the first to lose a court over something. I noticed news media use rel=noreferrer. I think that’s the least one needs to do (“data minimization”).
Don’t expect me to defend the GDPR. It’s neoliberal/conservative bullshit; even an abandonment of enlightenment values. But it’s the law nevertheless and a lot of people on Lemmy positively love it.
Unless you dox yourself what kind of personal information are instances sharing?
Don’t IP addresses get associated with posts?
It certainly is against the GDPR to federate with US instances.
considers
I don’t think that it is, even for EU instances, in that the GDPR regulates businesses, so it’s out-of-scope for the GDPR.
In theory, I suppose that GDPR implications might come up if someone starts selling commercial Threadiverse access at some point, though.
There might be some interesting questions providing Usenet or maybe XMPP, though, as there are commercial providers of those services, and they are federated and transfer data all over the world.
kagis
Hmm. This has some people talking about it for XMPP. At least this guy’s first pass is that it might apply:
https://mail.jabber.org/hyperkitty/list/operators@xmpp.org/thread/F5EGKYVPD42PPHOW72VBOS5E6OZTA22M/
Under UK GDPR (not sure about the EU one) the only grounds for exemption is “Residential use” (other than police and national security, which are also exempt), quoting from the ICO:
“Domestic purposes – personal data processed in the course of a purely personal or household activity, with no connection to a professional or commercial activity, is outside the UK GDPR’s scope. This means that if you only use personal data for such things as writing to friends and family or taking pictures for your own enjoyment, you are not subject to the UK GDPR.” [1]
(For those who don’t know who the ICO is, they are the British data protection authority, see [2])
At first, at least in my case, this seems pretty easy. The data is stored domestically, it is used with me and my friends for communication, there shouldn’t be any more to it… right?
But there is. I regularly connect and talk in many MUCs for open source projects, such as Ignite Realtime (which this was initially discussed until Guus suggested moving it to operators, thanks Guus :) ).
IP addresses, are considered identifiable information, logs will store said information, this therefore means my server is storing identifiable information on other servers, in this case, servers which could be considered for commercial purposes.
It needs to be noticed commercial purposes doesn’t necessarily mean paid services, charities and non-profits are included within the definition. Open source projects COULD be considered commercial purposes because, although contributions are provided free of charge, it is still a “donation” of sorts in the way of code.
The definition of “professional” does not seem to be clarified anywhere on the ICO page, nor in their legal definitions [3]. It doesn’t seem to be within the UK GDPR legislation [4] (I will admit I did not read all of this, I tried searching for keywords and found nothing, if someone read it all and knows where this exception is clarified, please let me know). Professional could mean a lot, but I will assume it is to do with some sort of “work”, which therefore would include open source contributions.
This therefore could break the “no connection to professional or commercial activity”, to be honest the easiest thing to draw from this is if it involves someone who is not family or friend (or yourself), you are very likely to not be exempt.
For those who will suggest a zero storage solution, where the XMPP server doesn’t store any data, it still comes under GDPR due to PROCESSING of data, simply processing it, even if you don’t store it, will have GDPR requirements.
Failure to pay when you are required to results in fines.
This is really cracking open a huge can of worms, it isn’t so much of “ah £45/yr is no big deal”, once you are exempt you must follow all the legal requirements of GDPR, and for a hobby? Is it worth it?
I am 100% sure, an XMPP server which does not federate, which is used to communicate with friends would be exempt. But I have my doubts whether a federated server can still use the same exemption clause.
the GDPR regulates businesses,
The GDPR regulates everything and everyone, including individuals and non-profits. See Article 2. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679
For example: If you keep a personal journal and write about your friends and acquaintances, that’s out of scope. [ETA: As long as the journal is private. When it’s shared outside the household, it is in scope and probably a violation.] But when the Jehovah’s Witnesses go door to door and make notes who opens etc, that’s in scope. [ETA: And has been ruled a violation by the ECJ.]
At some point the Fediverse is going to have to protect itself from Europe.
Telegram isn’t either. Certainly not by default, and definitely not public channels.
2015: A Russian performance artist, Pyotr Pavlensky – notable for some high-profile actions, like nailing his scrotum to Red Square with a nailgun – is arrested after he sets fire to the door to the headquarters of the FSB.
France extends him political asylum.
2017: Pavlensky is arrested after he sets fire to the door to the Bank of France.
There’s a certain degree of symmetry with Pavel Durov.
