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Comment by cwoolfe | Hacker News Reader

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That website is a bit… unusual (read: puritan). It seems to be anti porn (in general) as well. From the “Christians and porn” part:

A 2016 Barna Study Found: --Teens & young adults view “not recycling” as more immoral than viewing porn. ( survey responses: 88% Stealing; 56% Not recycling, 32% Viewing Porn.

(This doesn’t necessarily detract from the other things they have posted, but it provides a bit of context.)

That may be true, and still I don't care - it's not my problem, and I don't want to waste a single CPU cycle of my mobile phone in scanning for content that I do not have.

Educating young people and restricting the very young access, is a cheaper and more effective policy of curtailing and routing out such images. I found the cherry picked stats rather iffy on enough dot org.

These solutions don't require any new laws - parental controls are already legal.

I wonder why it is that the Netherlands hosts 77% of urls for child exploitation

    Netherlands 77%
    US – 5%
    France 4%
    Russia 2%
    Lativia 2 %
    Luxembourg 2%
      (Internet Watch Foundation Annual Report, 2020)

 - from OPs link https://enough.org/stats_exploitation

I wonder why it is that the Netherlands hosts 77% of urls for child exploitation

I'm not sure if this anecdotal point is applicable but I have run into many shady server resellers in the Netherlands. Oddly a couple of them are just down the street from The Hague. It was so prevalent for so long that I used one of them to do all my port scanning from a long while back. Pretty much anything goes. They would just forward abuse@ reports to the server renter so they were aware. I was expecting them to drain my throw-away bank but it turned out there is still some honor among thieves. Either that or some of them are honeypots. Other clients were the only issues I ran into. They would steal my IP addresses so I had to steel them back. no L2 port protection. I don't know much of this is still true so it's just a data point.

I wouldn't trust stats from the IWF... or the UK in general since they classify drawings as CSAM/CSEM.

Large internet exchange would be my guess

> It is technically possible to do client side scanning; and since we don't trust the government to do it, we can do it on localhost only, and report AI-flagged results to parents

I'm afraid I don't understand the last bit - to whom is a device going to report flagged content?

The idea is to combat it on on children's devices so that they are not able to produce CSAM without their parents knowing about it. The proposed solution doesn't combat on the recipient side.

I may be misunderstanding, but isn’t the technique you describe—using general classifiers to interdict new CSAM and adult content on the child’s device, with reporting to parents—already widely deployed on iOS and largely uncontroversial, since parents can easily adjudicate false positives and edge cases? [0]

I thought the technologies at issue involved either breaking encryption to allow authorities direct visibility into all digital communications, or various flavors of centrally-maintained blacklists of known images, with the idea that the device or the service automatically vets all new user data against the blacklist (e.g. [1]). All of which is impossibly tempting to extend to other types of content that the powers that be find antisocial, inconvenient, or embarrassing.

For what it’s worth, in the US at least, there are jurisdictions that prosecute children as child pornographers for sending images of themselves to their romantic partners (e.g. [2]). I can see how, if I were a parent in that situation, I’d want to know about and deal with that behavior without the fear that my child might spend the rest of their adolescence in prison and the rest of their lives on a pedophile blacklist.

[0] https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

[1] [PDF] https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...

[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/juvenile-justice/minnesota-prosecu...

great pdf! thanks for sharing!

I thought the idea of CSAM was more about matching an image to a list of fingerprints/perceptual hashes of known cp, locally on a device. Then that match is sent to Apple/Google/etc. and then they will notify the local authorities that you're a pedo. I also was under the impression that Apple already did that (at one point at least).

> I also was under the impression that Apple already did that (at one point at least).

Apple backed down on their on-device CSAM scanning. It was never implemented.

However cloud image hosts, including iCloud, do scanning (PhotoDNA etc) of uploaded photos and have done so for years.

Doesn't the law say, at least in the US, that detected CSAM has to go to the government first?

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