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Google Aims To Cull Child Porn By Algorithm, Not Human Review
According to a story at VentureBeat, "Google is working on a new database of flagged images of child porn and abuse that can be shared with other search engines and child protection organizations. The database will help create systems that automatically eliminate that sort of content. ...
If the database is used effectively, any flagged image in the database would not be searchable through participating search engines or web hosting providers. And maybe best of all, computers will automatically flag and remove these images without any human needing to see them." Here's the announcement.
What is the point of automatically removing child porn so it's not searchable. That's not the problem with child porn.
The problem with child porn is real children are being really abused to make it.
Making it "not searchable" doesn't stop that. Arresting the people who are making it does.
If they mean "all underage" and not just "blatantly children", good luck with that. There are no characteristics that will distinguish between 17 and 18, or even older. What is the software going to think of Kat Young, for example? What about models who are just small?
Also are they going to attempt to sort through drawings at all, considering they are legal in some jurisdictions and not others?
I sense false positives and angry models in Google's future.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
How about instead you compile a list of where these images are HOSTED.....and then DO SOMETHING about that? Notify local law enforcement of the images and give all garnered info about said images to them.
Police are legally allowed to possess contraband in the course of an investigation; private-sector entities aren't, absent some exception in the law permitting them to. For example, you can't keep a large collection of drugs for research purposes (e.g. training drug-detecting sensors) unless you apply for special permits.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Let me be clear about this. I DO NOT condone child pornography at all; I find it foul and disgusting. But there is a over-reaching that I think may go on here. If I purchase a server and I engage in a P2P network, then it is not Google nor any one else's business what I transmit. If the server is a public server or one owned by a company (such as Google), then I would agree they have every right to remove such foul content from their servers.
Yes I would rather that the people who engage in this be stopped. But whenever programs like this are created they tend to start out being put to use with the best of intentions, but will likely be used for other more nefarious purposes. If this algorithm is used to sniff out child pornography, it could be modified to sniff out a information about a political party and quell it, or news that a government agency doesn't want people to know about.
With all that has recently come to light about the spying by the US Govt. can you really say that this with 100% certainty that this technology won't be abuse for other purposes? I can't.
Again I DO NOT condone Child Pornography.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Removing child pornogragphy is a laudable goal.
We just have to realize that it won't stop at that. From the what the article says it seems like that technology could be used for any image. At the very least I expect we'll see general copyright enforcement from this. Worst case we will see things like various regimes being able to use this to suppress images they don't like. Oh you have pictures of us slaughtering our opponents well we better put those on the bad list.
My reaction was something similar. I question the value of a search engine when it is no longer neutral. Now I will only see what Google has decided it is in my interest to see. This technology will be used in the future to skew political searches for example, or to favor one company's products over another's. (If it isn't already.) Now if they said 'we are using Google's search engine to catch child pornographers' I would say good for you please continue.
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This will increase child abuse. As soon as it becomes invisible, perpetrators are completely free to do whatever they like, as the public will not be aware it is a problem. The reason is that it addresses the wrong problem. Distribution of CP is a minor issue. Creation of CP (and all the child abuse that is not documented or does not end up on the Internet) is the real problem. It seems politicians have become so focused on distribution of CP, that nothing is being done anymore to fight actual child abuse. After all, distribution of CP gives nice and easy convictions and to hell with the children themselves.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The age of consent in spain is 14, in the uk 16, in the USA 18 , so if there's a picture of a nude 15 or 17 year old in what country does it get to decided if its legal?
While this may be a laudable effort I have the sneaking feeling the USA once again will be pushing its legal system and morality onto the rest of the world.
You are absolutely correct that this won't make child porn disappear. But from Google's standpoint, it will help keep their top-notch search engine (and other search engines) from being used to find it. In addition, it's more than making it "not searchable"; RTFA. This will also have "hooks" into law enforcement and ISPs.
The technology is out there. It will only get better (by a magnitudes of a 1000) in the next decade or so. It can be used by governments for all sorts of purposes - so the solution is not to limit the technology (which can't be done) but by limiting the government (which can be done).
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
i think the problem with this system lies not in its intent but in its effects. I'm less concerned about whether it is searchable than about the abuses involved in creating it. I'm also concerned about the fact that we've seen charges involving 14-17 year old girls sending 14-17 year old boys their own pictures via their cellphones, marking them as felons and sex offenders for life. We need to figure out what is and isn't acceptable in our society and make it clear where that line is before matters get worse. There's true "child porn" and then there's "child" porn. There is a vast difference between the two, and while I'm not in favor of either personally, I do have a problem with treating them as if they were the same.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Porn is undefinable partly because your culture has an important part in whether you consider something pornographic or not. Also, the intent of the individuals involved has a large impact. A naturist website might have pictures of underage nude children, but without being considered pornographic whereas a young teen (e.g. 15 years old) sharing a selfy of her breasts would be considered to be making CP.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
A lot of people are misunderstanding what Google is developing here.
This is not "automated" censorware that would make its own decisions as to what should be censored. It's not going to analyze images and decide to censor them on its own (which would result in the kind of false positives you claim).
It's censorware that would, once a live human Google employee has viewed a piece of content and made the decision that that particular content is to be suppressed, globally remove all copies of the same content from Google's database. See, one of the major obstacles censors face nowadays is the so-called "Streisand effect," where suppressing a piece of offensive content results in dozens, sometimes thousands, of people mirroring the content and publicizing their mirrors. If people want the information, they'll get it; censorship always fails, and in many cases completely backfires.
But, software like this will ensure that in the future, if a corporation or a government wants to suppress information, they will be able to do so.
Of course, Google and others will only use this censorware to go after CP, which as we all know "everyone" hates, so I guess everything is okay.
Liberty in your lifetime
What about borderline content such as non-pornographic nudity, sexually explicit drawings of imaginary minors, and pornographic images of adults who look like teenagers? It's likely these will be branded as "child pornography", leading to images being suppressed that are legal in many jurisdictions including the United States.
Once service providers start censoring content based on third party reports of alleged child pornography, it becomes much easier to supress other content as well. Organizations such as RIAA and MPAA would love to be able to flag arbitrary content as infringing and have ISPs block such content automatically, bypassing even the need to file DMCA takedown notices. Think of how often YouTube videos are incorrectly flagged as examples copyright infringement and extend this to all ISPs who check against Google's database, and you can see the problem.
ISPs who participate in this system delegate the right to make judgment calls on material that isn't obviously illegal to the maintainers of a central database whose judgment may or may not be consistent with local law. Anything in the database is assumed to be illegal regardless of its actual legal status, and the ISPs just follow along instead of deciding individually whether or not the content is likely to survive a legal challenge. Once the system becomes widespread, ISPs may even feel it is necessary to follow it to avoid secondary liability for content posted by their users.
This is yet another example of a worrying trend, where content alleged to be illegal or infringing is removed without due process and often with little regard for the law and relevant jurisprudence. It's no way to run a network that for many has become a primary means of communication.
Internet users deserve better than to have their content blocked according to extralegal judgments with perhaps no bearing on local law, little or no chance of appeal, and no way to establish legal precedents protecting certain kinds of content.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I get to see the REAL "dark Internet" every time my ISP's service goes out. *cue rimshot*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I doubt that any sane person would have their browser start up with such things (even it they were into it). With that in mind, I would wonder how that happened.
Either a virus/hijack or something as simple as some site changing the start page would be my guess, but would be scary as heck for a normal person. I could see some sick-minded people jacking other people's PC for lulz with such stuff, or just to taint the pool a bit. At the various least it warrants DBAN and a full reinstall, but in many cases it might be safest just to scrap the drive.
At least it was visible. Worse would be if they were using hidden iframes or something like that to cause cache-tainting...
Thankfully I've not run into anything like that on a personal machine. I did once work on a win2k box where an idiot contractor preferred to turn on anon FTP rather than creating himself an account, and left it on over the weekend. I never looked at the actual content stored on the box, but the filenames were repulsive enough that it got new drives and the old ones got the drill.
In the early 1980s there were only two practical ways to transfer child porn: "Locally," which meant in person, by local courier, or by a "drop" or similar means, or "non-local" by courier, shipper, or the Post office.
Finding other people to trade the stuff with in a way that the cops wouldn't easily find you was also very difficult.
The US Postal Service inspectors and other police agencies were so effective that by the early 1980s it was said that child porn trading through the mail was virtually wiped out, AND that police were finding virtually zero "new" images.
The advent of the computer scanner, particularly the color scanner, changed all of that. Now people could use computers to send images to each other 1-on-1 or via invite-only bulletin boards and, well, I don't need to go on from there.
I remember the "bulletin board lists" of the 1980s. The "adult" boards were typically marked or in a separate list. I can't help but wonder how many of those had "secret, invite only" areas that held illegal images. If you know, please don't tell me. Unless the answer is "0" I don't want to know.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Well, maybe not Google but the U.S. Department of Justice. They have a database of all child pornography images known to law enforcement. Whenever there is a prosecution, the images go to them to determine if there are any new ones. They also try to identify who the child actually is with some success. So, in conjunction with them, it would not be difficult to create a database of "images" that Google is proposing. The question is why it's taken them so long? This DOJ database has been around for quite a while.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Because you only need a little of a *specific* drug to be able to detect that drug. If you want to create some sort of sensor that detects *all* drugs in general, you need small quantities of *every* drug, to be able to discover similarities. This is impossible, probably, because 'drugs' is to broad a concept.
Similarly, with child porn, you'd need only one sample of every instance of child porn. There's no use keeping 20 copies of the same image. But because the smallest amount of each instance is that instance itself, you need to keep 1 copy of as much instances as possible.
This is really common sense, so I actually don't even know why I'm explaining such a simple concept.