Tumblr was removed from Apple’s App Store over child pornography issues
theverge.com
theverge.com
Its difficult enough to have reliable, safe sites where arists can create, share in legal artistic pornography, but with Tumblr being forced to mass-wipe things they're deleting both sfw and nsfw content. Most likely based upon reports, which in Tumblr culture are typically fake.
There should be grounds for suing apple in mistreating the market in this manner, as this is real loss of profits involved, but I doubt it would work. Either way Tumblr is gonna lose a good amount of it's userbase.
Except for the fact that both reddit and imgur have quite heavy handed moderation in place.
Mature content (even when marked) is often removed from imgur. Reddit will ban entire subreddits if NSFW content goes anywhere near legal questions.
Tumblr wasn't allowing the cp. As the article says it was immedietely deleted. In what way is this different to reddit or imgur? I doubt either have better image recognition, if any at all.
The Tumblr app, on the other hand, was HOW you would view porn. If you tried to go a NSFW Tumblr in Safari it would ask you to log in, and then bounce you into the app.
On the topic of pornography access, Apple is incredibly immature about it. They have a fetish of trying to remove pornography access, which should be unacceptable.
That said, the way this works is if people report Tumblr they will ban them. So, it is either luck of the draw, or the problem is worse on Tumblr.
And that said as well, there has been plenty of child porn on Twitter over the years. (Unfortunately I have run into this firsthand because I run Twicsy, a Twitter picture search engine that has indexed nearly 8 billion Twitter pictures)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/sen...
As a platform you cant really filter this, unless you blanket ban all archive files. For tumblr this might be viable, but for a file hoster it wouldnt be
Unfortunately there's not any easy or sufficiently strong defense against someone gradient descent-ing your algorithm.
I had friends at a startup that was doing this 10 years ago and they were doing a marvelous job. Don’t know what happened to it, blocking porn isn’t something that people really want to pay for imo.
But it’s totally doable and it doesn’t involve hashing / fingerprinting.
Sell it to libraries, or any other place that has publicly-available computers.
(My local library has a regular wifi network, and a second one that doesn't filter NSFW content.)
But the context here is hashing all images in order to catch illicit images, particularly child pornography.
Presumably people who distribute such images take a rather more practical approach to security.
So implementing a universal change to the internet needs to work against those using bank-vault level security rather than easily-picked, easily-booted down, easily bypassed "domestic front door" level of security.
If you implement something that will work in 99% of cases in the net then you'll let through billions of images from those who take a combatative approach to law enforcement. The result being no effect against the criminals you want to catch.
(Your local version of GCHQ will be able to reduce their database size though.)
They then use perceptual hashing techniques to identify similar images. It's a game of cat and mouse but ultimately I think with ML, the mouse is going to lose.
- Clearly word their TOS/AUP to forbid any depictions of minors in a sexual context. They are a private organization, it is well within their rights to exclude any content regardless of whether some might have fringe legal status.
- Assign even one single moderator to pro-actively hunt down obvious keywords, blogs, and content.
- Have an easy 'report post' and 'report blog' functionality. Ban false reporters accounts.
It's a private curated app store, they can do whatever they want with it.
We're coming upon a time where some private markets have too wide of effects to not be actionable.
Or, as I have learned from HN, different rules apply to Apple vs rest of the tech companies?
Absolutely. They can do whatever they want with their platform. Facebook bans people and groups all the time based on it's own whims, Google and Youtube as well.
That doesn't match what they are claiming though.
Apple requires such sites to have a filter to prevent child-porn and the claim here is that Tumblr was removed for not having one that works. If those other services have a filter that works (sufficiently, I guess) while Tumblr doesn't, then it's not playing favorites, it's just having a policy and enforcing it. To limit the dissemination of child-porn. It might be hard to sue for that.
Now, I'm sure you can come up with an argument about why this still applies to Safari... but it's also easy to come up with an argument about why it does not.
Certainly, the relationship between the content and the app is much more tenuous for Safari -- where the content is everything published on the web by anyone -- and the Tumblr app, where the objectionable content is hosted by and for the Tumblr app.
In the end, you can argue Apple should have drawn the line about responsibility for content in a different place, but clearly a reasonable line can be drawn that allows Safari but doesn't allow Tumblr (with a broken child-porn filter).
How effective filters are is another question, but Apple has long stated rules that apps must not provide access to “objectionable” content without some kind of access control which doesn’t seem to meaningfully exist on Tumblr.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-investiga...
Same thing as removing Twitter because a non filtered post showed up in someone's feed.
Some developer at Tumblr is now grumbling, "I fucking told you we needed to spend more time on the filter system, and that it wouldn't work properly when you forced me to ship it to prod after only 3 weeks instead of the 6 weeks I told you it would take". Someone there knows that the cron/API that updates that database is non-functional or untested, but nobody higher up the chain of command gives a shit.
Source: have dealt with this kind of management time and time again. In particular, "Agile" development has destroyed this industry. You tell management the task will take 6 weeks, so they assign 3 weeks to the ticket in Jira, and suddenly that means the feature has been promised as being deliverable in 3 weeks. If not, it's somehow your fault for not meeting deliverables.
That's in fact one of the reasons I don't use an iphone and don't develop iphone apps.
What I don’t understand is why multi-million and billion dollar companies can’t try harder. On many sites a simple search will find forbidden content that they somehow can’t find? Gimme a break.
Isn't this Karma out to get them? What Tumblr has done to its users, Apple has done to Tumblr.
There should be grounds for suing apple in mistreating the market in this manner
There should be grounds for suing Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook for presenting themselves as platforms for expression, then turning around and acting as censors.
By ddging "legal artistic pornography", note the comment section has this:
""" Nope. There is no difference between art & pornography in art: The distinction is an imaginary one .
I shall now debunk our authors premises, with historical context.
“1.Nudity in art has been an accepted subject since ancient times while pornography is an unacceptable expression which has been developed in later years.”
Nope. This is a common misconception, but images & texts pertaining to the act of sex & sexuality, what our author would argue is porn, has existed in art since mankind first found a way to scrawl rudimentary images having sex.
Later societies constantly pretend that earlier societies didn’t do it, from the erotic frescoes of Rome, to the carvings of India’s Khajuraho Temples, to the 35,000 years old carving from ancient Germany (about 10,000 older that the “Venus of Willendorf”).
“2.Nudity in art is natural and is meant to let the audience appreciate the human body while pornography is intentionally done to arouse sexual feelings in the audience.”
Then you’ve just declared any amount of ancient classical art pieces to be pornography, since many of them were designed to arouse.
” 3.Models of nude artworks pose naturally and do not convey any eroticism while pornographic models have expressions and poses that are erotic and sexually arousing.”
What does one mean pose naturally, any pose one can do with the human body is by definition natural. Such a distinction as you are trying to construct is a distinction without a distinction, because the poses one would use to arouse are as possible by humans as the pose of eating.
” 4.Nudity in art is accepted in society while nudity in pornography is seen as inappropriate and is banned in most societies.”
Which just goes to show the double standard. The subject matter is the subject matter, which is why this tactic has been used for centuries to try to get artwork banned. You can’t show kids this image because it’s porn…. Oh you mean Michelangelo’s David is porn? How is it porn? It has nudity in it.
“5.In some cases, what one person may view as art might be viewed as pornography by another depending upon how the presentation affects the audience.”
Which again shows that the difference between what makes up pornography & what makes up art is an artificial distinction, that only exists in the minds of people who imagine it exists.
Read more: Difference Between Nudity in Art and Pornography | Difference Between http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/fashion-beaut... """
My reading is that there is no such thing as artistic pornography.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=child+pornogra...
Or you can compare that with the unqualified term:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=child+pornogra...
A detailed assessment of what is or isn't obscene:
https://books.google.com/books?id=ccQf_RJ4eXUC&pg=PA5&dq="ch...
I do see a difference between pornography and simply art in which someone is nude.
Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."
There are things that we understand in practice, but fail to objectively define. That's because pornography is a social idea that changes on circumstances. 'Artistic Pornography' is when the pornography has an artistic value. An artistic value is when the intentions of the art is to depict more than the sex. Typically portraying love, acceptance, insecurity. A medium which is meant to create emotion, a story that doesn't necessarily have to be told through words. That has much more artistic value.
Tumblr had quite a few artists that would depict these things very well.
But really when I said that I meant porn that's well made. Problem being that people lump all porn together, and it's just not the same things. Videos on the front page of Pornhub vs manga with some romantic sexual relationships for example.
Second, as it relates to enforcement. Your post shadows the fact that you disagree more broadly with removing child pornography because of collateral damage. To be totally frank I find that line of argumentation viscerally disgusting.
But it's also the wrong frame for the argument: you additionally claim that given Apple wants to crack down, they are cracking down the wrong way. I am not sure what the issue with selectivity is. Why is it a problem to apply higher standards to large, commercial applications who could easily be coerced to improve enforcement (as opposed to, like, Joe Random making some app that finds images online)? Why, when choosing among large commercial applications, should Apple not go after the worst offenders (in quantities of violation or currently enforcement protocols) first?
This seems like an efficient use of enforcement resources on Apple's part. One target at a time, optimizing for those who are worst in complicity and most able to take action?
It's clear what Apple and other app stores do. They are a market that makes plenty of money, and they mistreat it. There are losses of revenue over this mistreatment, and that should be actionable. Wether it is or isn't is a matter of law, but law doesn't cover what is and isn't right.
"Your post shadows the fact that you disagree more broadly with removing child pornography because of collateral damage. To be totally frank I find that line of argumentation viscerally disgusting."
That's a strawman. By that logic if I say taking down the internet because cp exists on it, is bad, then I'm defending it. I'm saying that tumblr is going on a spree of mass deletion to appease apple, not in any targeted manner to the initial problem, being that of cp found on their site. I'm saying that all platforms have this, and targeting tumblr for it in this improper way, removing the app, is doing far more harm than good. If Apple cared about solving the problem of cp they'd get in touch with Tumblr and tell them effective methods they should impliment that are fair with other apps, and if they don't do it, then they'll remove tumblr app. Instead, now those who were using Tumblr to share cp will take to a different site, instead of facing repercussions.
If anything Apple could potentially be interferring with ongoing investigations of cp by their lack of cooperation. I think that form of illigal activity goes above the grain of just throwing things into chaos to set examples.
Basically prove to Apple that they risk the viability of their app store when they censor specific apps. With the full legal power of Apple at their own disposal, they might just find a clever way to keep this situation from ever happening again.
I basically stopped using tumblr for porn because of how much nude, as well as non nude pictures of kids I've reported to tumblr.
It's a big issue. It's also incredibly easy to find child porn on there and despite reporting it, it always seems to pop back up.
I get that people will post shit regardless but it really seems like they don't try to do anything but delete the single blog that has been reported.
This is a site that's based around people "liking" and "reblogging" content. It's insane to see a picture of some kid being exploited, see how many blogs have reblogged and/or liked the picture, and then see how tumblr doesn't even attempt to address these blogs that clearly are doing the same thing, clearly liking the same things, and clearly reblogging the same pictures as the reported blog.
I've reported blogs for harm to minors well over 20 times. It's a drag.
The irony is that the same mechanism that allows that content to propagate is also the perfect tool for eliminating it. Liked/reblogged the content? Banned.
1 ) I'm unfortunately not surprised. For my girlfriends and I, Tumblr was basically effectively a place to express our lesbian-ness and effectively collect 'tasteful' nudes.
It wouldn't shock me in the least to find teenagers doing a similar thing, which, of course, would be illegal.
While others are saying that Tumblr was sort of picked on unfairly here, I'd argue the percentage of NSFW content that's easily-accessible on Tumblr is, in my personal experience, much higher than that of many other social networks.
2 ) That folks are still using Tumblr is a surprise to me. It seems as though many of my friends and I had a mass exodus about 4-5 years ago.
Seems common for platforms to wind down and for exoduses to occur, but I haven't heard of another tumblr-like. Where did people head off to?
We read books. We listen to records. We have actual human interaction. It's awesome.
I mean, hell, apps geared towards sexual encounters do a better job of filtering content. Grindr, Tinder, etc. Meanwhile, tumblr is pretty much unfettered access to whatever you fancy, not necessarily able to be bound by iOS' own filtering options such as Parental Controls in an elegant way.
Trouble is, if tumblr raised the app's minimum age to 17+ as with a lot of other apps with , that's a great deal of the app's userbase that can no longer access the service. On the other hand, heavily filtering content now means a huge backlog of content to sort through, with plenty of legitimate, if highly erotic, material ripe for getting falsely flagged as inappropriate.
tumblr's in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation, though one entirely of their own design.
2: Add loads of unwanted material to webtwopointoh.com
3: 'Find' said unwanted material, claim bonus
No wonder then that politics usually introduce laws related the Internet under the "safe the children" slogan. It really does changes the perception.
The crucial difference is something either is or is not child pornography, regardless of context. But whether something is copyright infringement depends on a whole variety of factors, and the exact same content uploaded by two different people might be a violation in one case and not in the other.
Also, in case of Apple and their App Store it’s not only CP, it is all kind of NSFW content that has to be filtered out. And that can be nuanced.
It appears that for now the filter mechanism is simple: the content is scanned against known database of bad stuff. So, a twist on a Content ID.
There are some services that you can funnel content through, but getting access to them is tricky and getting a hit adds some reporting and compliance requirements, not to mention I'd be piping all my users images straight though microsofts servers.
Well, I’m not sure it’s FOSS or anything like that: it’s maintained by the police (a weak assortment of the services that handle that in different countries) and it has a key feature: it’s a bloom/hash filter of sorts, i.e. you don’t need to open the image to make it work (because even opening the file would be illegal). It recognises photos similar to those already flagged (which are absolutely not free, open or available in any way for obvious reasons). A typical implementation is to move the flagged image in a dedicated folder with very strict access-control, keep really reliable traceability and send details to your local dedicated police team. Even access to the filters is tightly controlled too, because the wrong kind of people could use it to sift through a lot of images.
Because it’s a fairly standard tool for any image hosting company, I’m surprised Tumblr has been shamed. Either they messed up their integration, or they ignored police requests. It’s odd.
Not an expert, but I've worked with large companies that used humans to filter user content. Either they were breaking the law en masse deliberately or there is a safe harbor for doing manual filtering.
Again, I don't know the answer, but I'm very skeptical that it's always illegal to manually filter user content. Presumably swift deletion (and cache purging, if possible), reporting and record-keeping would be important. Although that does raise the issue of how you preserve evidence for police to take action if you delete it immediately... geez this is such a landmine.
- credit where credit is due: the technology was developed by Microsoft;
- it was developed as a generic image recognition software, hence the neutral name;
- it is a hash, not a bloom filter; not sure why I remember it as a bloom; it doesn’t appear to be able to recognise new images;
- the technology is widely used, but it was donated by Microsoft to International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) which isn’t loosely connected but, yes, has close ties with all local law enforcement on those questions.
It is available on Azure Marketplace, so widely available. The technology is still being expanded to work on videos and could be used to identify terrorism-related content. Because it’s meant to be resistant to alterations but not infer new content, it is not able to flag new content: that has to be manual. (Someone at the ICMEC has a horrifying job.) I would assume that it is generally implemented by flagging some images in uploaded albums and sending the whole album, or images from the same uploader, for manual verification. That would explain what I’ve heard about some images being potential.
To come back to the original story: it seems more likely that Tumblr’s problems are related to new images.
They told me to fuck off, no individuals wanted. Their site just states you need to "go through a vetting process".
Apparently you de-facto need to be a corporation to allow user uploads without getting fucked now.
I can understand individual sites taking down such images, but anything further seems like overreach.
And I still think enforcement of these laws should be absolutely draconian. This isn't a victimless crime: real lives are being absolutely destroyed. It's not like legalizing weed where suddenly you have a lot of people using it openly and responsibly. There is no acceptable degree of child rape that we can tolerate in society.
I'm 100% with you if we were talking about file sharing. I'm 100% opposed to you on this specific subject.
Just like videos of people being graphically murdered, for instance. I'd put 3guys1hammer up with anything else on the internet in terms of "should not exist", but that doesn't mean I think it should be illegal to possess/distribute/view.
All matter and objects can be broken down into a configuration of numbers (of electrons, protons, etc.). Either possession of things can be illegal or not. To exempt "digital" things will be less and less a clear line as technology advances (3d printers and, presumably, eventually "replicators"). I don't know the answer, but "they're just numbers" doesn't help us solve these difficult questions.
A gun is just iron and various other metals arranged in particular configuration and yet we don't have a problem regulating metals in that manner. Bits are just bits until they're in a configuration that is illegal under current law.
Maybe the law should be different, but saying "it's just numbers" isn't very illuminating, imo.
Reductively, a gun is a pile of atoms, like everything else, but unlike child pornography, it has the capability of acting upon the material world.
Your primary care doctor can treat you for Anthrax, and you'd likely be fine. The only difficulty in 2001 was that individuals were in contact with it that didn't realize, and mistook it for a common cold or flu.
Edit: The motivation of that attack was the fear, not the deadliness. In 2001 only 5 people died, and only 17 were infected. As we've seen, a single gunman can do a lot worse without requiring special training or equipment.
While I do think concern about over zealous enforcement is warranted, and opens up potential for abuse (e.g. embedding illegal content in other files to troll or extort people), I don't object to the principle behind banning it even if it is "certain configurations of numbers".
When there is a market for something, that will result in more of it. And, you can’t generally make child porn without children.
It’s not a huge logical stretch to suggest that some content ought to not be legal, especially when the participants are unable to legally decide if they want to participate. Banning child porn isn’t the slippery slope to full censorship as it is often portrayed as. There should be some common sense involved. Banning child porn doesn’t lead to banning political speech or even distasteful speech, societies should have some limits on speech and I would suggest that child porn would be will within reasonable limits and not necessarily leading us down a road of total censorship. Plenty of legal freaky stuff out there that it seems reasonable to exclude children from the mix.
In fairness, the only point of this would be a more purist implementation of freedom of speech, but well, the status quo is rather pointless too.
So, we should ban not only production, but third-party possession or distribution of any photography/video depicting either results of crime or the actual commission of crime, because it creates a market for crime?
We also know that the idea these images are out in the world is something that causes trauma to the victims.
It's pretty easy to make the opposite argument, in fact. People want access to CP, either because they're sick, they're in the age range in question, whatever, and so they go to the only place that has it available - darknet sites that require OC to view. So they go out and create more to gain access, harming kids.
Right now, the way to gain access to CP is to create CP, which of course incentivizes creating more. This is arguably worse than the world in which it's available to all.
This is false; there are plenty of free websites, and people who leak "pro" content on those websites. I'd like to see some statistics on paid versus unpaid content, and whether abuse is actually incentivized just to gain access to more. As far as I know, the research on this topic is conflicting.
But none of it's accessible unless you have a direct URL, and even then the pornographic crazy stuff is taken down quickly. The Imgur front page is pretty sanitized.
Either Yahoo should clamp down and meanwhile give the platform a solid update -- otherwise they'll probably shut it down sometime in the future. I can image the cost of running it must be pretty high.
It can do it while prohibiting child pornography. In general, Tumblr is pretty bad at its product, maybe it's a yahoo thing.
Copyright raises its ugly head here. Yahoo presumably can't legally encourage the outright IP theft that would entail.
Since tumblr will host things other sites won't, eventually someone will push the envelope and if they don't get shut down it will get pushed further and further. It's not about "any porn -> child porn", it's a progressive furthering of what is/is not allowed, and once you learn everything is allowed and nothing is banned, child porn (and other illegal content) is an inevitability.