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Encrypted message metadata can keep them all more secure

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It is the future encrypted. Real-time encrypted chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp and messaging apps like Telegram, WeChat and Messenger. two out of five people worldwide: help protect privacy and facilitate our rights to organize, speak freely, and maintain a close relationship with our communities.

They are deliberately built for convenience and speed, for interpersonal communication and connections for large groups. However, these conditions themselves are the ones that have led to abusive and illegal behavior, misinformation and hate speech, and fraud and deception; all to the detriment of the vast majority of their users. In 2018, research reports examined the role that these characteristics played in dozens of deaths. India and the elections in Indonesia and Nigeria and Brazil. The ease with which users can forward messages can lead to misinformation without verifying accuracy scatter quickly, covertly, and on a noticeable scale. Some applications support very large groups — up 200,000Or hosted organized encrypted propaganda machinery, imitating a breaking from the original point of view “living room.” And some platforms have proposed profit-driven policy changes, allowing business users to take advantage of customer data in new and invasive ways, which ultimately erodes privacy.

To respond to damage caused by these applications, prominent governments they have asked the platform to set up so-called backdoors or use automated message scanning by customers. But solutions like this erode everyone’s basic freedoms and put many users at greater risk, as many have done. he stated. These moderation measures and traditional moderation solutions that rely on access to content are rarely effective in tackling network abuse, as has been shown recently. research By Stanford University’s Riana Pfefferkorn.

Product design changes, not backdoors, are key to reconciling encrypted messaging uses and misuses. While the content of individual messages can be detrimental, it is the scale and virality of allowing it to spread that presents the real challenge, with the set of harmful messages resonating with vulnerable social forces. Already, researchers and advocates have studied how they change forwarding limits, better labeling, and reduced group sizes can significantly reduce the spread and severity of problematic content, organized propaganda, and criminal behavior. However, this work is done using solutions such as tiplines and public groups. If the platforms are not good data sets, these changes are hampered by any real-world effectiveness audits.

Platforms can do so much more. In order for major product changes to be more effective, they need to share “metadata metadata” with researchers. A platform includes aggregated data sets that show how many users there are, where and when accounts are created, how information travels, what types and types of messages are most quickly spread, what messages are reported, and how (and when) users are. botata. To be clear, this is not information that is commonly referred to as “metadata,” which usually refers to information about any particular person, and can be very personal to users, such as their personal name, email address, mobile number, close contacts, and even payment information. . It is important to protect the privacy of this type of personal metadata, which is why the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights is directly involved. takes into account when the user’s metadata is applied to the online space that should cover the privacy rights.

Fortunately, we don’t need this level of data or this type to start dealing with serious damage. Instead, companies need to talk to researchers and regulators first about the nature and extent of metadata. gather, with whom they share this data, and how they analyze it to influence product design and the choice of revenue models. We know for a fact that many private messaging platforms collect a wealth of information to design and test new product features, or to gather huge amounts of information that serve to attract investment and advertisers.

The combined and anonymous data they collect, without compromising encryption and privacy, can be used by platforms and researchers to clarify important models. These unified metadata can lead to improvements in trust and security through better features and design options.

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