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Comment by prophesi | Hacker News Reader

One thing that rocked me to the core and changed my stance on privacy recently is how child porn/abuse/trafficking/grooming/etc is simply swept under the rug by the Tech Giants. Safe Harbor laws have been used to push the problem elsewhere, and the issue is accruing exponentially. These images are absolutely everywhere; Facebook removes millions every year from their platform. And these are just the ones posted in plain sight.

No idea what the solution might be, or if it's even possible to be solved. It's a depressing topic, and you have to have really good opsec to do any journalism on the matter without landing in serious legal trouble.

https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/

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I really think Sam had the wool pulled over his eyes by Gabriel Dance. Around 17 minutes into the podcast, Dance says that he's been investigating tech companies for years and goes into issues with ad targeting, Twitter bots, etc. Then when he's relating the story about getting a tip, he effectively admits that he's pursuing this because he wants to make tech companies look bad. This explains why he always quotes absolute numbers (instead of percentages of all images/video shared), and why he never says what fraction of that content is teens sexting. It also explains why he avoids suggesting concrete solutions to the problem: there aren't any good ones.

The only solution to the problem of child pornography is backdoors in all encryption. Facebook must be able to scan the messages you write. Apple must be able to scan the photos you take. AWS must be able to scan your servers. The US Government must be able to intercept your communications and decrypt your devices. If there is any consumer device with real encryption, it will be used by perverts, sadists, revolutionaries, psychopaths, and a few weird principled nerds. And the problem of child pornography will still exist, except now the government will be able to spy on everyone's private communications and use that to exert much more control over them.

It's been a few weeks since I listened to the podcast, but I thought Dance explicitly mentioned how sad it was for Facebook to get a bad rep for releasing those numbers when such transparency is a positive thing. It shows that they're at least trying to get it off their platform. And if more people knew the numbers, this issue would finally become too large of an elephant to ignore.

And he did offer one concrete solution: platforms with easy discoverability (in other words, easy to masquerade as and target teens) may not need end-to-end encryption. Let FB and such run their algorithms on those messages. And it may be safe to assume three letter agencies are listening in. End-to-end encryption still serves its purpose for whistleblowing, privacy, and fair democracy; it'll just be found elsewhere, like Signal and such.

This still isn't an ideal solution. I personally think it's an unwinnable battle. Easily duplicated instantaneous secure multimedia communication is ridiculously revolutionary.

> Then when he's relating the story about getting a tip, he effectively admits that he's pursuing this because he wants to make tech companies look bad.

Just because he's a gadfly doesn't automatically make him wrong.

However, I just don't understand how these images are so common. If I ever stumbled on an image like that I would assume that it was obviously a honeypot.

If there was ever a discussion that should be heard by more people working in tech, that’s that right there.

DDG’s results are (perhaps decreasingly) heavily based on Bing, which as you will learn from that discussion had had significant issues with CP discovered (and reported to FBI) in its search results effortlessly—even while the same images were flagged by Microsoft’s own photo DNA algorithm.

That is very concerning for the end user.

Did they ever confirm it was CP? Or did they report it without looking at it because it was flagged by the algorithm and didn't want to be held liable?

I had an associate that was tasked with writing a crawler to find this sort of stuff.

There were two problems: Burn out from seeing what the crawler found. And only scratching the surface and getting more hits than any law department could ever hope to track down.

It's all just amazingly depressing.

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