“Child Abusers Run Rampant as Tech Companies Look the Other Way” | Hacker News Reader

“Child Abusers Run Rampant as Tech Companies Look the Other Way”

nytimes.com

19 pointsGlyptodon11 comments

Those evil tech companies! What would possibly be the purpose of lumping all tech companies together as if there's some collective criminal guilt tech companies must share. It makes sense for something like cigarette companies or oil companies, since the collective noun is based on the bad thing they share. In the case of "tech"... come on! This describes a huge range of companies with completely different business models. Is MongoDB looking the other way at child abusers? How about Cisco? Is Salesforce?

Sorry for the rant, this is just so careless and sloppy. It's like referring to a specific bad thing that was done as being done by "the media". No, that specific news outlet did that. Not the media as a whole

I dunno. Reading through the article, it seems like that really is the thesis - the authors think every company which stores or processes data, which may well be the majority of tech companies, should be scanning it to make sure it doesn't contain illicit material. Their examples of specific companies which aren't doing enough scanning range from search engines to cloud storage to enterprise video conferencing.

Sigh. I mean, they have a point, but what do they really expect tech companies to do? There are some obvious cases where Google obviously does something stupid and Microsoft is more than a little oblivious as to what is going on on their search engine.

It's not like this is the first thing someone thinks about when building a product however like Dropbox or AWS and AWS is vitally important to quite a number of businesses.

Sure, they could have moderators scour through all of that, but how many trade secrets and private documents will they see in the process? Insider threat and corporate espionage is a real problem, could anyone trust them after that? There have even been some cases where classified documents from the Department of Defence have turned up on AWS (there are a few news articles which attest to this), although perhaps it should not have been there in the first place.

There are also all the personal photos and all sorts of embarrassing things on someone's Dropbox account, unless they plan on getting some sort of warrant, then they really shouldn't be rummaging through all of that.

The correct link is: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-c...

What a terrible article. The thrust is that it's bad that:

- Facebook leads in reporting, with 45M possible cases, but apparently even that isn't trying hard enough

- Facebook is moving toward E2E for messaging

- Amazon doesn't intrude on customer data

- Dropbox, Microsoft and Google do not sufficiently intrude on their users data

Imagine AWS started scanning your VMs for digital contraband... How many customers would actually put up with that?

Imagine cars would record and forward to police everything said in them. We must hold Volkswagen responsible for the child abusers driving around rampantly, while they look the other way. We cannot allow the inside of a car to be a "law-free zone". Police is still unable to find out what was said in the van before the 2017 London Bridge attack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_London_Bridge_attack

Right. And even if all those companies found everything that goes through their systems, they'd arguably accomplish nothing more than catching the punters. Mostly kids and old men.

Most people who create and distribute child sexual abuse imagery don't likely operate on the open Internet. They're in private forums on Tor onion services. Along with I2P and Freenet.

So this is mostly propaganda to build support for the Panopticon.

Well, apparently they use mainstream services quite a lot, even openly where search engines can index it. I think what goes unsaid here is that Facebook reported a lot of it to the authorities and they don't do much about it anyway.

I'm not arguing that people don't share and save that stuff on mainstream services. I'm arguing that 99% of them are just looking. And that most of the ones who are actually abusing are much harder to find.

So what the Panopticon will accomplish is saturating the system with punters, with no substantial impact on abuse.

That, and nuking privacy online. Which, I argue, is the real goal.

Yeah I completely agree that spying on us all is the real goal whenever politicians and high level law enforcement officials bring this topic up.

People have been sexually abusing children before we had electricity let alone the internet, so even if there was never another abuse image posted the actual abuse will continue.

I can't imagine why they look the other way, do child abusers by ads?

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