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The Worst Job At Google: a Year of Watching Terrible Things On the Internet
Cutting_Crew writes "Gizmodo has called attention to a story that describes the worst job you can get at Google: wading through and blocking objectionable content, which includes watching decapitations and beastiality. A ex-Google-employee who did just that tells his own story of a year-long stint of looking at the most horrible things on the internet. In the end, he needed therapy, and since he was a contractor, he was let go instead of being hired as a full time employee."
Bestiality not beastiality.
An unnamed police department in the United States had a policy for child pornography investigators:
* You could only do it for a few months then it was someone else's turn
* You had mandatory psychological help
Oh, and you had to be trained ahead of time.
Here is a 2010 New York Times article on the same subject. Seems like not much has changed. Apparently a bunch of it is outsourced, which in addition to the nature of the work, leads to questions about content privacy, especially when some of the images being reviewed are non-public (e.g. stuff you've sent through Facebook messages).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Uh, perhaps not using google would get you around 'googles' blocks?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html
The 2-year old article I linked also explains that all Google content reviewers are on one-year contract because of the nature of the work and have access to counseling. From TFA it seems many of these reviewers got the false impression that they would be hired fulltime after completing the one year. Considering that Google seem to have pretty tough hiring process, I'm not surprised that very few of these reviewers get hired fulltime. Their managers must be filthy liars though.
That might be true with a psychopath but a sociopath (which is what the OP probably meant) would be quite capable of watching the videos and understanding how other people would react even if they don't react themselves. Sociopaths in general learn during their childhood to mimic empathy to fit in. The classic example is Ted Bundy, a perfectly (in public) outgoing and social individual who knew how to mimic empathy but in private was cutting people up to see what their insides looked like.
Can you imagine the lawsuits if Google DID have these guys on the payroll and, 5 years later, ONE of them went nuts-o and harmed another employee, and that employee was NOT aware of the attacker's previous job description?
The risk is not employee on employee violence, it is risk of suicide.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
"Hare writes that the difference between sociopathy and psychopathy may "reflect the user's views on the origins and determinates of the disorder." The term sociopathy may be preferred by sociologists that see the causes as due to social factors. The term psychopathy may be preferred by psychologists who see the causes as due to a combination of psychological, genetic, and environmental factors."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
Research suggests that, “psychopaths are a stable proportion of any population, can be from any segment of society, may constitute a distinct taxonomical class forged by frequency-dependent natural selection, and that the muting of the social emotions is the proximate mechanism that enables psychopaths to pursue their self-centered goals without felling the pangs of guilt. Sociopaths are more the products of adverse environmental experiences that affect autonomic nervous system and neurological development that may lead to physiological responses similar to those of psychopaths. Antisocial personality disorder is a legal/clinical label that may be applied to both psychopaths and sociopaths” (Walsh & Wu, 2008).
http://blogs.psychcentral.com/forensic-focus/2010/07/sociopathy-vs-psychopathy/
And if you want a bit more about the history of socio/psychopaths, reading this article about sherlock holmes not being a sociopath might also be helpful.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
"I was wondering the same thing. Aren't there rules regarding employer responsibility? Surely such rules would apply to contractors as well."
It's not a cut-and-dried situation, but from what I have read, it looks to me like Google is pretty clearly over the line here.
Generally speaking, if you're a contractor, you have personal control over at least one, but probably all three, of the following things:
(1) What you charge for your work.
(2) The hours that you work.
(3) How you do your job. If you are a "contractor", you are presumed to already know how to do your job. If the company has to tell you how to do it, you're not a contractor, you're an employee.
Was this guy an "obscenity" expert before he was hired? Probably not. Google probably sat him down and said, "This is what you do, this is how you deal with violations, these are the hours you must do it in, and this is how much we pay.
Even if it's only for a year, that's not a "contractor". That's an employee. I think Google is really screwing up here, and they are bound to get caught at it.
I think you're telling a few too many stories, yourself. As well as making assumptions.
Cool. Don't take my word for it. Research it yourself. Here's a start.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
My sister worked for the eBay thought police for several years. Mostly it was offensive images that people replaced on their web site in place of an existing image that someone else linked into an auction page so that they victim had to pay the bandwidth costs for the picture of the picnic table (or whatever), rather than the seller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inline_linking
Apple employees who work with customer data in Final Cut Pro, iMovie, QuickTime, Logic Studio, and Aperture, as well as some other packages get to sign agreements about exposure to offensive material.
Adobe has similar agreements for employees who might be doing work on Photoshop for customer data.
If you're actually in the industry that generates the images in the first place, there are similar agreements.
I was at a startup that did web site reverse proxy caches for a while, and had a similar agreement; you can guess at the sites where you'd want the ability to carry heavy load on a landing page.
One word: OSHA. Much as Google may not like it, they're not exempt from workplace health and safety regulations. If those truly are the working conditions, the contractors need to have a good sit-down with one of the local OSHA inspectors complete with show-and-tell. Note: being a contractor doesn't change things, the regulations apply to the workplace and not just the employees.
The problem is that repeated viewing of these kinds of images can de-sensitise a person enough to affect their personality.
A friend of mine is a child psychiatrist and she told me that the uk serious crimes unit have specialist child porn officers who have to sift through thousands of images on a day-to-day basis. They are only allowed to do this for a maximum of (if IRC) six months before they are taken off the job and a lot are given therapy because they become so traumatised by it.
They do this because they found that after a while people can not only become de-sensitised to it but they can actually start to be aroused and find they like what they are viewing.