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Comment by Hizonner | Hacker News Reader

If they are manually verifying all of the hashes, and training ML to detect previously unreported images, that means they must be retaining a vast collection of material that they know is illegal. Not just passing it on with reports, but intentionally collecting it, retaining it for the long term, and processing it.

Anybody have any idea why they're allowed to do that?

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I can't speak to Google's implementation, but I highly suspect it is done in partnership with NCMEC. They are a non-profit that can work directly with private industry that was created by an act of Congress and can legally hold this type of material.

When you put it that way, it is extremely disturbing to think that, statistically speaking, the largest consumer of child abuse material in the world might very well be Google (and/or Apple, for their version of the tech).

The people at Facebook/TikTok/<your favorite social media> responsible for filtering posts against policy that get mental traumata without being payed much are probably also serious contenders

Yeah, and I'd also throw a few three-letter-agencies' hats in the ring, like the NSA. Would be a serious competition.

But I think we all know who the true winner is: Vladimir Putin. His personal stash has petabytes of material.

Am I the only one completely bewildered by this comment? Putin seems like Not A Great Guy TM, but did I miss some expose?

Weird idea, but what would happen if you’d employ convicted pedos to review such content?

I guess you wouldn’t be able to fix them this way…

"pedo" is not a crime anyone can be convicted of.

I think the largest storage source should be the US government (and other world governments). This is as it should be since they prosecute cases and naturally collect evidence. Evidence can’t be destroyed just because someone was found guilty.

Nothing in the article implies what you suggest.

There is plenty of legal porn imagery and legal non porn imagery and legal child imagery and legal adult imagery. It's not so hard to make your system detect if an image is similar to both porn and child.

Nothing in the article implies what you suggest.

On the other hand it seems one method is more likely than the other, given the legal implications of each.

You can dependably tag a 4 foot tall 18 year old as an adult?

> It's not so hard to make your system detect if an image is similar to both porn and child.

Yeah, I'm not so sure. Naked child bodies are very different than naked adult bodies, so it doesn't obviously follow that naked child bodies would be classified as porn without those being in the training set.

If the AI can "match" a picture of a black man to a gorilla, it can match a human child body to an adult body.

Flagging false positives for human review is within operating parameters.

That's pure conjecture.

They are allowed to do it because it benefits "law enforcement". See my other comment.

Most countries have legal clauses permitting storage for filter work.

There's a regulatory framework and process for this sort of thing, you can probably find more details in the articles about Apple's recent CSAM kerfuffle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Missing_%2...

My understanding is there’s an industry standard corpus of images from child protection agencies used to train machine learning models.

I’d be surprised if storing the hashes is illegal.

The hashes are fine. But to train image recognition models they’re going to need to retain the original images.

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