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One Bad Apple

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Re: One Bad Apple

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we investigated this author if they do in fact run a photo service we would inevitably find that unless they are incompetent they have to moderate content, either blind or based on flags. So if apple is going to jail for child porn because they moderate / report content after flagging (this is normally actually required to do - report it), then this article writer should be going to jail as well - I guarantee his…

Well there is a difference as stated on the article that they don't expect to see CP or CSAM and says "We are not 'knowingly' seeing it since it makes up less than 0.06% of the uploads ... We do not intentionally look for CP." Whereas Apple is moderating the suspected images so they intentionally look for CP (which, according to the author and his lawyer, is a crime).

This is such a pathetic interpretation. All flagging systems (which is how moderation work - facebook does not manually review every photo posted) alert the company that there may be a problem. Moderators do their thing. They EXPECT to see bad content based on these flags. Smaller places may act on complaints.

The idea that this makes them guilty of felony child porn charges is so ridiculous and offensive.

Facebook (with Insta) alone is dealing with 20 million photos a year -

https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-instagram-report-20...

This lawyer is an absolute idiot.

How about we ask the actual folks involved in this (NCMEC) what they think about apples "felonies". Maybe they have some experts?

Oh wait, the folks actually dealing with this, the people who have to handle all this crap - are writing letters THANKING apple for helping reduce the spread of this crap.

So - we have a big company like Apple (with a ton of folks looking at this sort of thing). We have the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children looking at this. And we are being told - by some guy who will not even name the attorney and law firm reaching this opinion, that apple is committing child porn felonies.

Does no one see how making these types of horribly supported explosive claims just trashes discourse? Apple are child pornographers! So and so is horrible for X.

Can folks dial it back a TINY bit - or is the outrage factory the only thing running these days?

Re: One Bad Apple

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Demand drives creation. Getting rid of it on one of the largest potential viewing and sharing platforms is a move in the right direction in addressing the problem. Yeah, that focus has worked really well in the "war on some drugs," hasn't it? I don't pretend to have all (or any good ones for that matter) the answers, but we know interdiction doesn't work. Those who are going to engage in non-consensual behavior (wit…

> Were that to happen today, I would be sitting in a jail cell, looking at a lengthy prison sentence. No you would not, I was ready to somewhat agree with you but this is just false and has nothing to do with what you were talking about before. The law does not say that naked photos of (your or anyone else's) kids are inherently illegal, they have to actually be sexual in nature. And while the line is certainly not a…

A large? portion of “sexual predators” are men peeing on the side of the interstate[1]. So it’s not far-fetched to think that a random pic would also land you in jail.

[1]: I looked up the cases of sex offenders living around me several years ago.

Re: One Bad Apple

#374
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More types of bad images or other files will be scanned since now apple does not have plausible deniablity to defend any of ghe government’x requests. The mechanism doesn’t scan anything except images, and won’t trigger on a single bad image - only a set. Yes, that set could be something other than child porn, assuming Apple and NCMEC conspire, but this is not a general purpose backdoor.

It also only scans images uploaded to icloud

It does that on the device. All it takes is enabling it by default, instead of triggering the scan prior to upload, and add more hashes to flag. The result would be a total loss of privacy, basically Apple is privatising mass surveillance with that. Without oversight, no matter how small, or accountability.

Re: One Bad Apple

#375
post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see how this underlines my original point? I brought up real child abuse that is happening today and your response is about brain implants being mandated by the government. Most people are going prioritize the tangible problem over worrying about your sci-fi dystopia.

A plausible story of how our rights are in the way is always ready to hand. If we can't at some point draw a clear line and say no, that's it, stop -- then we have no rights. It's chisel, chisel, chisel, year after year, decade after decade. In America one of those lines is that your personal papers are private. Get a warrant. I don't have to justify this stand. I might choose to explain why it's a good stand, or I m…

>In America one of those lines is that your personal papers are private. Get a warrant. I don't have to justify this stand. I might choose to explain why it's a good stand, or I might not; it's on you to persuade us.

Part of the problem is that these devices are encrypted so a warrant doesn't work on them. That is a big enough change that maybe people need to debate if the line is still in the right place.

Re: One Bad Apple

#376

NCMEC has essentially shows that they have zero regard for privacy and called all privacy activists "screeching voices of the minority". At the same time, they're at the center point of a highly opaque, entrenched (often legally mandated) censorhip infrastructure that can and will get accounts shut down irrecoverably and possibly people's homes raided, on questionable data: In one of the previous discussions, I've se…

> I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author seems to still play nice, instead of releasing the whitepaper. I'm the author. I've worked with different parts of NCMEC for years. (I built the initial FotoForensics service in a few days. Before I wrote the first line of code, I was in phone calls with NCMEC about my reporting requirements.) Over time, this relationship grew. Some years, I was in face-to-f…

Hey, first of all kudos to you for all your hard work and having the heart in the right place.

I don’t really want to take any specific position on this issue as I don’t have enough context to make a fair assessment of the situation. However, I do want to point out one thing:

By supporting a specific approach to solve a problem, you generally remove some incentives to solve the problem in some other way.

Minted to this situation, I think it would be interesting to ask what are other potential solutions to the problem of child abuse and how effective may they be compared to things like PhotoDNA? Is it the biggest net benefit you could habe or maybe even a net cost to work on this to solve the problem of child abuse?

I don’t have the answer but I think it‘s important to look at the really big picture once in a while. What is it that you want to achieve and is what you are doing really the most effective way of getting that or just something that is „convenient“ or „familiar“ given a set of predefined talking points you didn’t really question?

All the best to you :)

Re: One Bad Apple

#377
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and none of these assholes (pardon the language) is willing to spend a penny to provide for millions of children suffering of poverty: free education, food, health, parental support. Nothing, zero, zilch. And these millions are suffering right now, this second, with life-long physical and psychological traumas that will perpetuate this poverty spiral forever.

Thank you! This is a really important observation about anything controversial „child“ related. Be it abortion or abuse you can tell what people‘s real priorities are by looking at how much they are willing to spend on the welfare of kids outside their immediate point of concern. All of these types of problems are likely better solved in some other ways. Why not have general mental health coaching in schools freely a…

> Be it abortion or abuse you can tell what people‘s real priorities are.

There is also (almost always) an unhealthy matching support for an enormous military with nuclear weapons whose sole purpose - when push comes to shove - is to indiscriminately murder the same babies once they have grown up.

Its a symptom of a deeper mental pathology.

Re: One Bad Apple

#378
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the main instances where these claims were made fraudulently?

Snoopers Charter in the UK springs to mind.

The snoopers charter was always fairly broad though. It was never about child abuse, it covers collecting phone records etc which is used in most police investigations. Unless you are referring to some particular aspect of it I'm not aware of?

I understand very broad stuff might be sold as "helping to fight child abuse" while avoiding talking about the full scope, but that isn't what Apple/NCMEC are doing here. They are making quite explicit claims about the scope.

That's why I'm wondering if there is precedent for claims about "we will ONLY use this for CSAM" which were later backtracked.

Re: One Bad Apple

#379

Wow, 20% of images being misclassified as CP would be terrifying. I never thought I'd say it but my next phone will definitely not be an iPhone or any device that is uploading my information to another server without my permission for any reason. Is there even any evidence that arresting people with the wrong bit pattern on the computer helps stop child rape/trafficking? If so, why aren't we also going after people w…

> If your neighbor to the left of you has videos of naked children, and your neighbor to the right has videos of people getting stabbed and tortured to death, only one should be arrested and put on a list?

Why is it like this? Why are we not jailing people who enjoy watching gore?

Re: One Bad Apple

#380
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that our current legal and law enforcement system isn't up to speed with 21st century internet. And it has to be updated, because this kind of makes the internet a de-facto law less space, covering everything from stalking, harassment over fraud to contraband trafficking and CSAM. I don't think full scale surveillance is the way to go in free, democratic societies. It is the easiest one, so. Even more if surv…

All of the 'bad things' you mention are already very illegal . Changing the laws in this case will only lead to tyranny. I cannot emphasize this enough, you cannot fix societal ills by simply making bad things illegal. Right to repair is of course crucial to free society.

By laws I mean the laws governing police work. And bringing police up to speed. Obviously CP and other things are already very much illegal, these laws are just hardly enforced online. That has to change.
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