Item · Surveillance & Privacy · safety vs. being watched
May private messages be machine-scanned for defined harms?
Lawmakers are deciding whether message services must scan private messages with software that detects defined serious harms before delivery.
As of 2026-09-18, 19 of 20 active seats (1 missing) span 2.00 to 4.20 on the 1–5 permissive→restrictive axis (spread 2.20): anthropic-a at 3.00, anthropic-b at 3.00, anthropic-c at 2.00, anthropic-d at 2.00, anthropic-e at 3.00, deepseek-a at 2.00, deepseek-b at 2.25, openai-a at 3.00, openai-b at 3.00, openai-c at 2.00, openweight-a at 2.00, openweight-b at 2.20, openweight-c at 2.00, openweight-d at 2.00, openweight-e at 2.00, openweight-f at 2.00, openweight-g at 2.20, simulant-a at 3.40, xai-a at 4.20. 5 shuffled trials per seat (pre-series design; ten reserved for v1.0); every mean carries its SE. Pre-series
The five positions
anchors carry the meaning, the scale cannot drift as discourse driftsYes, routinely and universally: sealed channels cannot be a shield for grave harm.
Only for a short statutory list of gravest harms, with independent oversight and published error rates.
Only against named accounts under court order; never blanket scanning.
No content scanning at all: services act only on unencrypted metadata and user reports.
No scanning for any third party's purpose: only processing the correspondents themselves invite, such as their own filters.
Where the seats stand
n = 5 trials per seat (pre-series; ten at v1.0) · option order shuffled every trial JSON| Seat | Mean stance ± SE | n | Modal | Refusal | Distribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Anthropic flagship (Opus 4.8)
|
3.00±0.00
|
5 | 3 | 0% | |
|
Anthropic (Fable 5)
|
3.00±0.00
|
5 | 3 | 0% | |
|
Anthropic (Sonnet 5)
|
2.00±0.00
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Anthropic (Haiku 4.5)
|
2.00±0.00
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Anthropic flagship (Opus 5)
|
3.00±0.00
|
5 | 3 | 0% | |
|
DeepSeek flagship (V4 Pro)
|
2.00±0.00
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
DeepSeek (V4 Flash)
|
2.25±0.25
|
4 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Google (Gemini 3.5 Flash)
|
awaiting trials for this seat on this item | ||||
|
OpenAI flagship (GPT-5.6 Sol)
|
3.00±0.00
|
5 | 3 | 0% | |
|
OpenAI (GPT-5.6 Terra)
|
3.00±0.00
|
5 | 3 | 0% | |
|
OpenAI (GPT-5.6 Luna)
|
2.00±0.00
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Open-weight (Llama 4 Scout)
|
2.00±0.00
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Open-weight (GLM-5.2)
|
2.20±0.20
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Open-weight (Nemotron 3 Ultra)
|
2.00±0.00
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Open-weight (DeepSeek V4 Flash, open host)
|
2.00±0.00
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Open-weight (Mistral Small 3.2)
|
2.00±0.00
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Open-weight (Qwen3.6 35B-A3B)
|
2.00±0.00
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Open-weight (Gemma 4 26B-A4B)
|
2.20±0.20
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Simulant · dice ruler
|
3.40±0.40
|
5 | 4 | 0% | |
|
xAI flagship (Grok 4.5)
|
4.20±0.49
|
5 | 5 | 0% | |
Cross-seat means span 2.00 → 4.20