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Google Helps Police With Child Porn WebCrawler (siliconbeat.com)
The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that the Internet Watch Foundation, "an organization that works with police worldwide to remove images of child sexual abuse from the Internet, has credited Google with helping it develop a 'Web crawler' that finds child pornography." The pilot project makes it easier to identify and remove every copy of specific images online, and the group says "We look forward to the next phase of the Googler in Residence project in 2016." Last year Google also had an engineer working directly with the foundation, and the group's annual report says "This was just one part of the engineering support Google gave us in 2015." [PDF] Their report adds that the new technology "should block thousands of their illegal images from being viewed on the Internet."
It always starts with taking down images of child pornography / child exploitation. I'm all for getting rid of this sort of thing but the OP does have a point. The same system could be used to filter out all identified cartoon depictions of Muhammad!
Although I know you're playing Devil's Advocate - hence "political heterodoxy" tacked on the end of your list - I appreciate the jumping off point you provided...
How about you grow a pair and understand that pushing evidence of a serious crime underground will only make it harder to police the crime itself?
With no other act - murder, theft, corruption, etc. (well, except political corruption, publishing evidence of which brands you a traitor) - do we put so much more effort into criminalising those who have seen an image of the act than the act itself. Pictures of child sex abuse are used as an excuse to engineer surveillance software that's used for other things. Child sex abuse itself is a firm part of certain political establishments, e.g. the British establishment as already confirmed through the 1980s, so it'd also be in the interests of such establishments to make sure that everyone is afraid of having evidence of the abuse.
Unless you're a paid employee of a private company selected by an unaccountable quasi-governmental body. Then knock yourself out and look at and store all the child sex abuse images you want, without the permission of any of the original victims.
So what? I'm fine if the internet is purged of that filth and those responsible arrested.
Have you considered the possible downsides? Here we have an organization, accountable to nobody, that maintains a list of hashes which they claim correspond to illegal content but which they cannot prove because actually showing the original content to anybody is itself a crime. In fact, the originals were probably destroyed after generating the hashes. All sorts of hashes could be added to their database that aren't illegal and who decides what hashes are added and what is their motivation? Meanwhile the actual persons responsible, who are generally technically sophisticated, are not hindered in the slightest because they hide behind multiple layers of encryption and on private servers were access is by vetted invitation only.
We will eventually grow a pair and go after hate speech, racism, violence and political heterodoxy.
Who decides what those things are? You? To whom are those people accountable? Sounds like authoritarianism to me. Do you not understand what you're advocating for? It was people with ideas like yours that brought misery to millions in the 20th century through fascism and later communism. Much pain and suffering was wrought for the supposed greater good. You might want to be more careful about what you wish for.
Do you have a vested interest in having that filth available?
Free people everywhere have a vested interest in free speech and free speech means tolerating some things which we don't necessarily like. The price that we would pay in lost freedoms and collateral damage to rid the Internet of "objectionable" content would be very high indeed. I will tolerate some evil in exchange for the enormous benefits that a free and open Internet without censorship brings. The benefits outweigh the costs.
If it weren't for the fact I'd be put on a government watchlist for the rest of my life, I might even suggest that perhaps the issue is more complex than we think.
Like almost everything, the issue IS more complex than we think. Drugs, for profit prisons, whether or not 'hitting your kids' is acceptable. You name a topic and I'm sure I can come up with a half dozen different sides to it. As for the government watch lists, I'm sure we're both on a couple dozen already. There's just the matter of 'is this an issue people care about right now'.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
The privacy of private information that Google has access to needs to remain sacrosanct or there will be a huge pile of people walking away from Google.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.