I* Newsletter: Network slicing, Apple backs down, trust and safety in E2EE environments

“I*: Navigating Internet Governance and Standards” was a monthly newsletter distributed by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), and compiled by the Public Interest Technology Group (PITG), a group of expert technologists who work across a complex landscape of internet standards development (“I”) organizations that convene in the public interest.

The newsletter highlighted emerging internet infrastructure issues that affect privacy, free expression, and more, clearly explaining their technical underpinnings.

# Trust & safety techniques in end-to-end encrypted environments: New findings from a trust and safety survey, conducted by Riana Pfefferkorn of Stanford University, provide a glimpse into how online service providers approach fighting abuse on their platforms.

Highly pertinent to the encryption debate, the paper focuses on “content-oblivious” approaches to fighting abuse, such as using metadata and user reports, which do not depend on the ability for providers to access user content at will. Despite strong consensus among participating providers that automated content scanning is the most useful means of detecting child sex abuse imagery, they do not consider it to be nearly so useful for other kinds of abuse.

Pfefferkorn says, “The research indicates that the negative impact of end-to-end encrypted systems on providers’ trust and safety efforts will be marginal, and likely vary depending on the type of abuse. Automated content scanning is not a magical silver bullet against abuse, content-oblivious techniques are effective, and end-to-end encryption does not prohibit providers’ and law enforcement’s ability to detect harmful or criminal conduct on online services.”

• For more information: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3920031
• Contact: Riana Pfefferkorn

# Apple backs down: Earlier this month, Apple announced it would be pausing its plans to roll out three new features in its devices to combat child exploitation online. CDT and over 90 other civil society organizations delivered a letter to Apple objecting to the changes in the name of the public interest, highlighting issues with breaking the end-to-end encryption in iMessage and the device-side scanning of photos stored in iCloud.

“Apple will be revising its Child Safety tools, and public interest technologists are prepared to review those tools and provide feedback or public criticism,” says Mallory Knodel, Chief Technology Officer for the Center for Democracy & Technology. “It would be a solid first step to hear Apple commit to user safeguards, like encrypting iCloud, such that even Apple doesn’t have access to user content.”

• For more information: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-icloud-photo-scan-csam-pause-backlash/
• Contact: Mallory Knodel, CDT

# “Network Slicing” innovations risk privacy, expression, and neutrality: Internet service providers (ISPs) are innovating ways to provide bespoke network access for specific purposes, and companies like Ericsson and Telus are testing and innovating on “network slicing” — an approach to verticalizing 5G networks for purposes like self-driving cars or private commerce.

The technique is made possible when the points on a network connection, from the end user to the requested service, as well as the intermediary points of traffic, are all controlled or operated by the ISP. However, new interoperability testing between ISPs could allow network slicing to become part of regular internet service delivery. But network slicing uses a variety of methods to route packets, such as information-centric networking, which — when compared to more traditional packet routing methods — collect more information about the end user, the service they’re connecting to, and even the content of the packet to determine its speed and path on the network.

Mallory Knodel says, “Increased use of network slicing techniques could require internet service providers to collect significantly more information about users and what they’re doing online. We’re  concerned with potential network neutrality violations, the privacy of end users and the ability of providers to stop or slow traffic.”

• For more information: https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2021/9/telus-and-ericsson-partnership-shows-how-network-slicing-is-changing-the-fundamentals-of-telecom
• Contact: Mallory Knodel, CDT

# Geopolitics in the infrastructural ideologies of 5G: Following the development of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) in Europe and the internet in the U.S., the fear and anxiety that have emerged around the China-led development process for 5G fit into a larger scheme of geopolitical technology development. A new paper explores how infrastructural ideologies function as tools in geopolitical struggles for dependence and independence of world powers, and seeks to understand how recent Western imaginaries around 5G infrastructures reflect, deflect, translate, and sublimate the infrastructural anxieties tied to the development and deployment of new network paradigms. Their controversial nature, contradictory content, and fragmented presentation is a necessary part of living through the trauma of lost historical agency on the part of Western superpowers.

• For more information: https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/12163/10340
• Contact: Niels ten Oever and Maxigas

# The quantum state of infrastructure reconfiguration in 5G: Historically, the development of transnational communication networks is analyzed along two axes: whether they are controlled by the public or private sector, and whether control over data streams is situated inside or at the edges of the network. With 5G, each of these qualities exist simultaneously, whereas previous technologies only existed in one quadrant at a given time. 

The early internet, for instance, was financed by the U.S. government and eventually came under the control of private corporations, but control of the network has resided at the edges since the beginning. The distributed transnational design of the internet has allowed companies to leverage network externalities, but has made it more complicated for countries to develop regulations.

By contrast, 5G technology puts more control in the network and increases the influence of the state, and in that way takes on characteristics of telegraph networks that depended on extensive encoding, decoding, and routing in the network by operators. Unfortunately, the way we envision 5G and future network architectures has negative implications for the public interest, which Niels ten Oever explores in a new report.

5G networks afford the state with more control by standardizing ‘lawful intercept access’ on every layer of the 5G stack, and also enable greater configurability of edge networks. In this sense, 5G networks seem to make promises to everyone: intelligence both in the networks as well as at the edges, and control by governments and corporations. Notably, though, end users are completely missing from this vision of future networks. Here, they are no longer understood as actors in network configuration or governors of data flows, but rather as data sources, thus feeding into logics of data extraction. 

• For more information: https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/12056/10441
• Contact: Niels ten Oever

# The plight of Federated Learning of Cohorts: This summer, in response to criticism from a rare alliance of advertisers and privacy advocates, Google Chrome abruptly ended its trial of Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a supposedly more privacy-friendly alternative to third-party cookies that sorts users into buckets of similar browsing patterns. FLoC was — and may soon be again — contentious and hotly debated in the press. A new article from researcher Gabriel Nicholas looks at which fears about FLoC may be overblown and which are warranted.

Nicholas says, “Google is using FLoC to define the problems of data collection and mass surveillance in a way convenient to itself, where what matters are harms to individuals, not harms to collectives such as disenfranchised groups or democracy as a whole.” 

• For more information: https://techpolicy.press/google-privacy-and-floc-lamb-or-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing/
• Contact: Gabriel Nicholas, CDT