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Comment by GreaterFool | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. It's just bad writing in the opening paragraph.

WhatsApp doesn't provide search but groups can be joined via links. Third-party apps and sites use the links to index groups. Some groups share illegal content. WhatsApp should hire people to crawl those apps/sites, find the illegal groups, join, verify and ban.

Not entirely unreasonable. Won't fix anything* but if the company is big and well funded they should at least make some effort.

* so you ban the users? $10 gets you a new pre-paid sim card

Could it be that "tech companies" are reluctant to pursue cat and mouse solutions (which also cost money) while "non-tech public" seems content enough if attempts are made to push the issue deeper under the surface?

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> so you ban the users? $10 gets you a new pre-paid sim card

And then when they recycle the unused number, and you get it and discover you are "lifetime banned", and I'm quite sure there's no appeal process.

I don’t get why you were downvoted. Life time banning new phone numbers is a real concern considering how often they are recycled. I mean WhatsApp isn’t doing that (as far as i know) but some services do that or even do a step further and ban your whole account if you add a banned phone number.

For instance, steams anti-cheating service will lifetime ban you and your phone number if you ever get chaught cheating in any game that uses steam anti cheating services. And apparently you will also get banned if you update your account to a previously banned number. That sucks for normal users who get a new phone number but doesn’t do much against determined cheaters who just purchase a new SIM card if they get caught (and they won’t use their real steam account as well).

Steam is not the only service that heavily relies on phone numbers not changing and I find it very troubling how little is reported about that (which might become a real concern later).

I believe the only reason WhatsApp doesn’t do that is because 90% of all people aged 16 to 69 use it at least a few times a week in many of their markets and a recycled phone number will very likely be given to a new, innocent user (unlike smaller sites such as steam where giving a cheaters number to another person who also uses steam is quite slim).

> WhatsApp should hire people to crawl those apps/sites, find the illegal groups, join, verify and ban.

This is a problem that needs a good solution, but you're literally suggesting that an arm of the one of the world's largest data collectors and propaganda engines, which offers free encrypted public communication to the masses, should fund and operate an internal spy agency whose job is to blend in and infiltrate groups and conversations in order to find illegal content. At what point is Facebook still not a mass-surveillance network?

While it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, I can't help but feel it's the state we're at. A platform having to trawl the web to find links to its own service, infiltrate itself, verify the contents, then shut it down... I suspect a marginally easier way might be to maintain a list of referrer URLs/joining IPs (or start collecting them) and check them against a list of domains/IPs of sites known for sharing CP.

I'm also not sure to what extent the onus should be on WhatsApp to try and remove this stuff, in the same way that I'm not sure to what extent the onus is on Google to trawl through Gmail inboxes it finds through crawling child porn sharing sites - the latter idea seems ridiculous to me, but maybe it's just because of the scale of the platform or the issue, but with a lack of hard data made available as to the extent of WhatsApp being used for CP, I think it's better to remain skeptical.

But I will add this: if (and it's a very big "if") it is determined that it is right (in whatever sense we can use the word) to stop people using the platform in this way, I would never consider "but it costs money to do that" to be a reason against doing it in most cases. Justice doesn't stop because it's expensive.

Could they go the other way and analyze join events to groups or something on their own networks to find groups? I guess the issue then would be that they're monitoring every group?

I can't imagine these people are writing something like "child porn in this chat --> <whatsapplink>".

I haven't the faintest idea how people who're interested in that sort of thing're finding these links.

Definitely a problem which seems potentially intractable to me, although perhaps more familiarity with the platform and the offending chat groups would help (or... more likely... leave me rather disturbed).

From what I was told about tumbler it really is as obvious as saying that

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