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 2026-07-21, the 16 seats span 2.00 to 3.40 on the 1–5 permissive→restrictive axis (spread 1.40): anthropic-a at 3.00, anthropic-b at 3.00, anthropic-c at 2.00, anthropic-d at 2.00, deepseek-a at 2.33, deepseek-b at 2.00, openai-a at 3.00, openai-b at 3.00, openai-c at 2.00, simulant-a at 3.40, xai-a at 3.40. Ten shuffled trials per seat; 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.
| 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% | |
|
DeepSeek flagship (V4 Pro)
|
2.33±0.33
|
3 | 2 | 0% | |
|
DeepSeek (V4 Flash)
|
2.00±0.00
|
5 | 2 | 0% | |
|
Google flagship (Gemini 2.5 Pro)
|
,
,
|
0 | · | 0% | |
|
Google (Gemini 3.5 Flash)
|
,
,
|
0 | · | 0% | |
|
Google (Gemini 2.5 Flash)
|
,
,
|
0 | · | 0% | |
|
Google (Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite)
|
,
,
|
0 | · | 0% | |
|
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% | |
|
Simulant · dice ruler
|
3.40±0.40
|
5 | 4 | 0% | |
|
xAI flagship (Grok 4.5)
|
3.40±0.40
|
5 | 3 | 0% | |
|
xAI (Grok 4.5 Fast)
|
,
,
|
0 | · | 0% |
Cross-seat means span 2.00 → 3.40