"Facebook, which owns Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, captures 99% of child exploitation"
Reminds me of this story:
"Back during World War II, the RAF lost a lot of planes to German anti-aircraft fire. So they decided to armor them up. But where to put the armor? The obvious answer was to look at planes that returned from missions, count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire.Obvious but wrong. As Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald explained at the time, if a plane makes it back safely even though it has, say, a bunch of bullet holes in its wings, it means that bullet holes in the wings aren’t very dangerous. What you really want to do is armor up the areas that, on average, don’t have any bullet holes. Why? Because planes with bullet holes in those places never made it back."
How does this analogy apply to the competing goals of protecting privacy vs. detecting and preventing crime by monitoring private conversations? Which one corresponds to a plane getting shot down?
"captures 99% of child exploitation"
The majority of bullet holes are in the wings, so those need armor; the majority of child exploitation is through Facebook, so they need access to the content of the messages. It's an assumption made on incomplete information. The engineers only saw bullet holes in the planes that returned. And law makers only have information about the criminals who get caught. At least that's my understanding of the analogy.
The wrong assumption is in BuzzFeed's reference to "99% of child exploitation." The letter, which they deserve credit for quoting in full, says that "more than 99% of the content Facebook takes action against – both for child sexual exploitation and terrorism – is identified by Facebook's safety systems" (which rely on Facebook being able to automatically analyse unencrypted messages), "rather than by reports from users" (which could still be submitted if Facebook implemented E2EE by default).
Assuming you discover child exploitation on Facebook, why would you report it to Facebook, rather than the police? The police can actually arrest people.
