Everyone is commenting as if this is an attack on privacy. Read the article, I might have missed it, but I saw literally nothing on this.
The main point is that police are profiling people using Pixel phones. Nothing about making it illegal, or trying to remove encryption.
Look, I literally have a Pixel phone running Mullvad. I care about privacy. But everyone here is reading the headline and arguing against a strawman.
This should be a discussion on how valid it is for police to profile people. Or maybe if it's actually true that drug dealers are using GrapheneOS.
Europe _is_ attacking encryption and privacy. But this is not it.
>The main point is that police are profiling people using Pixel phones. Nothing about making it illegal, or trying to remove encryption.
How can you think that profiling people based on their phones is not harmful to privacy?
In most western countries surveillance requires prior evidence of wrongdoing, if your phone brand or phone OS can be used as evidence that you might be engaging in criminal activity, that is of course a danger to privacy. It should be normal that people use Software and Hardware that respects their privacy and desiring privacy should never, by itself, be allowed to be evidence of criminal intentions.
Profiling isn’t taken as evidence of criminal intentions. It can be as simple as, you do random searches, but you increase the frequency of random searches for people who match multiple behavioral criteria empirically associated with criminals.
> This should be a discussion on how valid it is for police to profile people. Or maybe if it's actually true that drug dealers are using GrapheneOS.
Why can't it be a discussion about how valid it is for police to use the desire for privacy as a basis for profiling? Is that not allowed?
Are you saying that we're required to either talk about:
1) whether the police should profile anyone at all for any reason (why not this particular reason again?), or
2) whether Spanish criminals desire privacy, and therefore more often choose GrapheneOS than other groups of people (is this controversial? Is it worth discussing? Can't we just take the Spanish police's word for such an unsurprising data point?)
Those are our only two choices? If so, than the conclusion is foregone. Police will be allowed to profile criminals and suspicious people, and criminals will attempt to refuse monitoring and searches.
I'd rather talk about whether refusing to be monitored or searched can be allowed to become official grounds for state suspicion, though. Even without your support.
The original quote was a comment from one police representative about Pixel phones being the preferred choice of narco traffickers in their region.
All of the extrapolation about people using GrapheneOS globally feels like journalists trying to squeeze as much hype as they can get out of this one sound bite from one police rep in one area.
Critiquing police for doing fishing expeditions, where they cast a broad net in hopes to catch criminals among a large batch of regular people has long been a thing.
> This should be a discussion on how valid it is for police to profile people.
Exactly - though in this case I'm not sure what that means - if they 'feel more alert and suspicious' - that's just going on in their head ( pretty difficult to control that ). If on the other hand it means you are constantly getting stopped and searched that's another issue - but then you could argue that's then argument about the stop and search rules in whatever country.
ie what counts as reasonable grounds for the police to take concrete action.
I'll take it even farther - this should be a discussion about what constitutes crime, and how a system that didn't criminalize common, victimless acts would have such a small pool of criminals to deal with that widespread demonization of this or that technology wouldn't be neccesary.
It seems they're profiling based on specific local conditions. Not many folks are installing graphene in their area, but there are lots of criminal gangs that do.
The situation would be different in, say, Silicon Valley. But they're dealing with the world they're in.
Arguments shouldn't be soldiers[1]. In fact, this I'd say this is harmful to privacy.
If you start caring more about how it supports your side rather than the truth, you're playing politics. And in that battlefield you'll lose to eurocrats.
Look, I literally have a Pixel phone running Mullvad. I care about privacy. But everyone here is reading the headline and arguing against a strawman.
This should be a discussion on how valid it is for police to profile people. Or maybe if it's actually true that drug dealers are using GrapheneOS. Europe _is_ attacking encryption and privacy. But this is not it.