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Microsoft Anti-Porn Workers Sue Over PTSD (thedailybeast.com)
An anonymous reader shares with us a report from The Daily Beast: When former Microsoft employees complained of the horrific pornography and murder films they had to watch for their jobs, the software giant told them to just take more smoke breaks, a new lawsuit alleges. Members of Microsoft's Online Safety Team had "God-like" status, former employees Henry Soto and Greg Blauert allege in a lawsuit filed on Dec. 30. They "could literally view any customer's communications at any time." Specifically, they were asked to screen Microsoft users' communications for child pornography and evidence of other crimes. But Big Brother didn't offer a good health care plan, the Microsoft employees allege. After years of being made to watch the "most twisted" videos on the internet, employees said they suffered severe psychological distress, while the company allegedly refused to provide a specially trained therapist or to pay for therapy. The two former employees and their families are suing for damages from what they describe as permanent psychological injuries, for which they were denied worker's compensation. "Microsoft applies industry-leading, cutting-edge technology to help detect and classify illegal images of child abuse and exploitation that are shared by users on Microsoft Services," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an email. "Once verified by a specially trained employee, the company removes the image, reports it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and bans the users who shared the images from our services. We have put in place robust wellness programs to ensure the employees who handle this material have the resources and support they need." But the former employees allege neglect at Microsoft's hands.
Until somebody pairs that ai with DeepMind Dream and the poor thing starts spitting out pictures of nightmarish hardcore.
So they admit they monitor customer's personal communications as a matter of policy?
Is this how far we've fallen? No more are we concerned with violations of an individual's privacy. Now we are more concerned with the rights of the violators.
Seriously, if you are not fit for the job, you shouldn't do. Watching such horrific video is part of the job just like cutting dead body is a job of coroner. Neither should complaint about PTSD unless it is shown that everyone doing similar job gets it. If it is specific to your personality, then you should quit the job.
I vividly remember when "rotten.com", "bme.com", "ogrish" and "The Sickest sites on the Internet" index were a new and highly appreciated kind of never known before entertainment. Sure, looking into the abyss of psychopathia every day might get boring after a while, but it still sounds better than 90% of other jobs on this planet. I guess they just hired the wrong kind of people to do that job. They should have advertised those jobs on above mentioned pages, 4chan, or the likes of it.
And the problem is, like the Presidency, anyone that actually wants the job should be disqualified by default.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm mildly curious as to the nature of the law that allows the company to effectively act as law enforcement. I'm guessing that buried in the standard licensing agreements are clauses that compel the user to agree to it, but it is still rather surprising.
It's also surprising that Microsoft's HR and legal departments didn't see something like this coming, and take steps to mitigate it. Better counseling, and possibly rotating job duties so that individuals working in this department of the company also work in other departments and do not get immersed in this full time.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Or maybe we should get rid of civilization altogether..problem solved.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
I was pretty much done at 2 Girls 1 Cup. Actually, I was done after Goatse. It's bad enough when that kind of shit creeps up on you, but to actually go looking for it... yikes.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I suspect that they have some kind of AI that looks for nudes, and then a person looks it over to judge if it's likely underage or not.
So they probably don't look over every email, but somebody over at Microsoft may have a private pornography stash.
I worked as a contractor doing search engine testing for MSN Search. I had to see all sorts of terrible things. Including one day when I had to go through sites full of auto-playing videos of Nick Berg being beheaded. It was a low-paying, low-skill job that killed my computer, but I NEEDED the paycheck.
Jurors complain of similar effects from some of the evidence they're provided, and they are only exposed to horrifying images for fairly limited periods of time in most cases. I don't mean to denigrate your experiences, but if you think PTSD is limited to combat, then you don't dick-all about human psychology.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Isn't Tey out of a job? Sounds like the perfect fit.
So is Microsoft now a branch of the Justice Department? Or are they part of the FBI? Homeland Security?
..wait, what's that, they're not? Then why in the ACTUAL FUCK are they snooping through people's emails as if they were Law Enforcement!?
I don't like or want any CP being sent around or the people who are into CP being allowed to run around loose in the world, but: it is NOT the job of a private corporation, even one as fascist and authoritarian/dictatorial as Microsoft, to ENFORCE THE LAW. If they suspect someone of trafficking in CP, they should refer it to the cops, NOT INVESTIGATE IT THEMSELVES, DAMNIT!
Get the FUCK out of our private communications, you goddamned bastards!
People are just very different. I totally believe that some people genuinely "feel what they assume people on the screen feel when the images were recorded", and people who are like that are just not the right people for the job. Just like I wouldn't be the right person for any job done at great heights, since I don't feel comfortable walking on some shaky structure above an abyss.
Rick Astley has scarred me forever.
English must not be your first language.
Microsoft has employees that can effectively spy on you for no reason at any time if you're using any of their services.
Much like how Google does it. The reason you can't reach a human is because the humans are too busy spying on you and stealing your data.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As per subject - are these workers doing this stuff full time, year in, year out? In the UK, even the Police who do this are limited to two years on a team that has a responsibility to view the kind of content we're talking about here. Is this the case in companies such as Microsoft? (Note - this was told to me by a copper a few years ago, so, pinch of salt, etc!)
The billionaires still need us to build machines for them that replace us as servants, only then we will be killed.
But they knew this was the job, right? Why would you take a job and then keep working a job that you can't stomach?
I'd be great for this job, I'm dead on the inside.
The company you speak of might have had the right hiring concept, but unless someone with first-hand knowledge of the situation at Microsoft tells us, we cannot know how they did. Could be that some snowflake had the job of hiring people for the screening team and thought it would be a great idea to hire the most compassionate people as to favour strict verdicts on the screened material. Wouldn't be the first time those hiring had no experience in the position to fill and no idea of the qualifications required...
I think Hollywood just found its next movie plot
Why do you assume that everyone who's fine with watching sick videos is unqualified to correctly classify them? There's a very broad range between "being grossed out" to "consenting" to what one watches. Otherwise, everyone who has watched a crime movie would have to be banned from this (and many other) jobs.
They got dinged on their Employee Review for *not* watching porn at work.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
There is truly some disgusting pornography that will make me gag ...
Try watching CSPAN and get back to me about gagging.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"They "could literally view any customer's communications at any time.""
Wait. What?
It's always been that way. The deal is free email, etc. accounts for you, and in return the service provider spies on you, selling the details of your personal life to whoever it is that thinks they can profit from having or using it.
It's sold mostly to aggregators – who operate like the credit bureaus – but have few, if any, of those pesky regulations to rein them in when people apply their reports as if they were 100% accurate. You have no recourse if you find an error. Hundreds of companies have a "profile" on you. You have no means to discover who they are. . . or why you didn't get that job promotion that you were in line for. HR bought a copy of your profile from abcdwxyz.com, which is rife with errors, but HR people are stupid, and will read it as truth. Perhaps someone with a similar name has a felony, or worse the report incorrectly states it.
Why Microsoft does not make their spying abundantly clear will hopefully come back to bite them in the ass.
> I'm mildly curious as to the nature of the law that allows the company to effectively act as law enforcement
By that you mean "look at what's on their servers"?
You can of course look at see what is on your computer. Similarly, Microsoft can look at what is on their computers.
This was well established in cases in which companies were monitoring their network and their computers, which employees were using for personal use as well as for work. Companies, including ISPs and mail providers, can for example have filters to block users from sending out spam. In this case, Microsoft has decided they don't want child porn and certain other material on their systems, and has taken steps to remove it.
Unfortunately, either policy - allowing companies to access their own systems, or not allowing them to access their systems, has problems. If users cared, standard mail clients and other GUI clients would have made GPG/PGP easier, everyone who cared would have been using encrypted email for the last 20 years and it wouldn't be an issue. For whatever reason, people don't care enough to use a GPG/PGP enabled mail client.
That is weird in itself but the bad outcome is kind of obvious. It's a company acting like a government but in a half-assed way so of course they are fucking up. They are attempting law enforcement without the "wasteful" extras and finding some reasons why the "waste" was there.
Some people would absolutely love to do this job.
They already have a nice list of potential candidates, too bad they sent it to the police instead of the HR department.
This. I was a caregiver to my ALS-stricken wife for three years, and after she passed away, I was diagnosed with PTSD. It's not just combat that's stressful.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Agreed. How your mind works depends on what you feed it. If you feed it poison don't expect it to be healthy. Know when to say no. There are guilty pleasures like cat videos and failblog. When you diverge into child porn and snuff videos you're not going to have the type of mind that will relate to others. That's like a path to the real dark side. The path of a serial rapist or killer, don't go down that road, there is no happy ending there only tragedy. There are a million other better ways of spending the limited time you have on this planet. I think this is why a lot of people are cutting the TV cord and refusing to feed their brains reality TV and other worthless entertainment. Reality shows aren't that much better for the brain than 2 Girls 1 Cup.
Funny.... I'd have PTSD from being forced to engage in warrantless surveillance. Splitting hairs because it's "Microsoft's server, since they aren't the feds they can do anything they want" doesn't make it a good thing to do. They are effectively acting as law enforcement and assisting the feds in sidestepping the 4th amendment. The few people they catch doesn't warrant the intrusion on many people who didn't deserve it. Much like the patriot act and butthole searches at airports. Especially if they report "other crimes" which may be victimless.
THAT would give me PTSD. If I wanted to be law enforcement and "catch bad guys" I would have gotten a criminal justice degree and worked in law enforcement where there's proper checks and balances.
You'd be surprised. Maybe this suit is unique (I've no idea) but the phenomenon certainly isn't: this is a common complaint of people dealing with this kind of material; like police detectives. I've heard that the people dealing with kiddy porn on a daily basis generally don't last very long on that detail; apparently it is not something that you get desensitised to very easily. And a lot of them complained of symptoms that are at least very similar to PTSD. Maybe war isn't the only way to get messed up emotionally, tough guy.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
More power to you. I made the mistake of visiting rotten.com once in the late 90's, and somehow morbid curiosity caused me to spend about 2 hours looking at the worst stuff that I could see on there, I couldn't tear myself away because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And afterwards I went into a sort of depression for several days. I have never gone back and have actively avoided any situation in which I might see something similar. If I had to watch that stuff on a regular basis I would either, like you, somehow disassociate myself from the feelings that I have about such things, or go crazy. I don't think either is a good outcome personally.
However, if such people have to exist, then I am thankful that they do and that they can protect myself and those I care about from these things. So to everyone who has to do it - I owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude, and I hope you are paid very well.
This. I was a caregiver to my ALS-stricken wife for three years, and after she passed away, I was diagnosed with PTSD. It's not just combat that's stressful.
possibly CPTSD? Similar situation here.
Here's an interesting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This is an article I posted years ago but is still relevant (and I have taken liberty to link to the The Daily Beast article as well). Thought I would drop this here:
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/...
Title: [AMA Request] Moderators of the Internet whose job is to filter out illicit image uploads such as pedophilia, pornography & grotesque images
Behind Facebook, Google, Flickr, ImageShack, Thumblr, Instagram and many other well known companies offering hosting for photos is someone who has the sole responsibility of going through and moderating image uploads to filter out pedophilia, [illegal] pornography, disturbing & grotesque images, sacrificing their physiological health for the sake of many. I am sure most people even here on the internet even at a place like reddit probably never know much more than the fact that there has got to be someone doing it as algorithms and computers do have their limits. Without a doubt, a job like this most certainly must have an emotional, mental, pyschological, and social cost. There are many possible questions to ask such a person about their own lives and their job.
Below are my questions. I will add more as people contribute questions.
1. [2013/11/24 @ 0139, -6 GMT] What is your official job title?
2. How many friends do you have? Do you find it difficult to be "normal" around them? Do they know what you do for your job? How do they support you (or not)?
3. Same questions as in #2, but in regards to your immediate family rather than your friends
4. Is your job temporary/part-time/consultant-type, or official employee working full time? What kind of benefits and perks do you receive?
5. Are there any rules or regulations that are in place by the company for the sake of people who take this job position due to the nature of the job?
6. How much time do you spend rejecting/approving images? Does the system you use for performing your job show you 'all images without bias' or only show you images that algorithms picked up as possibly illicit? How often do you take breaks (or are required to)?
7. Are you required to perform any other activities or job functions beyond this (perhaps as a way of therapy)?
8. How do you get paid? How much do they pay you? Do you think they pay enough? (especially due to possible long-term consequences)
9. Maybe I have already asked this, but how do you cope with the things you have seen to keep yourself sane, normal, and contained?
10. What does it feel like emotionally and mentally? What kinds of thoughts run through your head on the job, on break, outside of job at home, amongst friends and family, etcetera?
11. If you have already moved on to another job at a different company of different functions, is this something you put down on your resume or told them about that you did as your previous job?
12. Do you feel paranoid? Do you feel like someone is watching you / someone that might be trying to corner and flag you a pedophile/pervert/sick person?
13. How did you find this job?
14. [2013/11/25 @ 1234, -6 GMT] Why did you choose this job? Did you know fully well what you were going to be doing?
15. Are married and do you have children? How do you feel around your children? How does your job affect you in this part of your life?
16. How long have you been doing this job (or have you done this for in the past)?
17. [2013/11/29 @ 0006, -6 GMT] What would you say the character/personality traits/type a person would need to have and be to make them more qualified and capable for this job than other people (possibly applying for the same job, or just in general)?
Relevant links for curious minds to get some thoughts started while waiting for someone who has done this job or presently is performing this job to pick up this AMA Request:
*
You can probably reduce the stress in the workers monitoring the porn by giving them two extra breaks to work off some of the physical tension their work leads to and a private fapping room so that other workers don't have to watch them. It probably won't help much with those watching the violent videos, but then again, we all know about people who get turned on by that.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
There's a difference between sensory unpleasantness - and the depths of human depravity. In normal human beings, it's almost impossible to unsee the latter and it gets inside your head in ways chest thumper he men like yourself can't seem to imagine or grasp. And this isn't the first time this has been reported among image moderators, or (and the individual above comments) among jurors for trials concerning this material.
I know several people with PTSD (not just combat vets but other vets from high stress positions, as well as cops and and emergency room medical professionals). One thing they all have in common is they don't brag about it. Nor do they use it as an excuse to put other people down. (And that's setting aside the idiocy of the false equivalency you set up.)
I don't want to remember half the stuff I've seen, and the majority of that was on accident.
If the majority of half of the stuff you've seen was an accident then you are seriously accident prone. Or you are quick to blame accidents, not unlike my son who usually swears some obnoxious act was an accident.
These aren't all public communications that these people were monitoring. No one has to read my email except the people I send it too. (Not even them sometimes.) No one has to do this.
Great, M$ can fire them for viewing child porn instead of paying for their psych treatment . This is a corporate win-win.
Of course not, only computers look at your data. Humans look at copies of your data that the computers then produce. See the difference?
I love arm chair psychiatry.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Outsource it to India.
I mean, won't everyone have nightmares about shrinkage with constant exposure to these materials?
PTSD has become an over-broad term. I don't like that: it should be limited to having an involuntary physiological and psychological response to some stimuli, that interferes with normal life. We need a different term for "I'm reminded of something disturbing I saw once", to distinguish that from "I'm suddenly flooded with adrenaline, reaching for a weapon, trying to find and kill the threat in the milliseconds before it kills me". That kind of conditioned physiological response isn't limited to combat, but it's different in kind from anything that follows from seeing some disturbing images.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
workers screening content weren't using Linux
Oh, I don't know about that. Having to view "Please install Flash 11.0 to view this content" over and over would probably give me PTSD.
Have gnu, will travel.
What was the source of the data that were these workers filtering? Hotmail emails? Office 365 files? Azure storage blobs? I am more interested in this story from the surveillance angle.
boggles the mind.
Surveillance, censorship, repulisive materials, just EW.
I can't even grasp it.
You seem to have confused cause and effect.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/reyha... No lawsuit from this one, or at least none mentioned. Same lack of support, though. I don't remember if anything came of this being posted.
Slashdot your i and slashcross your t.
No, he's worried that his private sex video from his girlfriend is viewed by some snotty perv in Microsoft. And apparently he's right. Or he's worried that some business meeting on Skype is viewed by Microsoft employees, which has a name: industrial espionage.
Or he's worried that some Trumpesk figure will have his little list of people he wants to get back at, and Microsoft will do that for him. Or perhaps some politicians is being spied on to influence elections, or some scientist or some judge or or or...
Well, that's kind of a strawman argument; the employees aren't saying that nobody should have to do it; they're saying that if management's plans require someone to do it then management should also have a plan for dealing with the mental health consequences.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If I break my leg doing something stupid while drunk, or if I break it while saving an infant from a burning building, the leg is still broken. They put a cast on it either way. If they've sustained psychological damage from policing porn for a paycheck, it doesn't matter if yours is more noble. Not sure why you're turning it into a competition. Is your ego really that small that you need to brag to people you don't know online?
PTSD has specific diagnostic criteria even including exclusion criteria (e.g. not due to substance abuse). The term isn't overbroad, it's just misused, like "Type A personality", which doesn't mean what people think it means.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If a court will buy that diagnostic criteria for PTSD, this seems like a cut and dry lawsuit:
Repeated or extreme indirect exposure to aversive details of the event(s), usually in the course of professional duties (e.g., first responders, collecting body parts; professionals repeatedly exposed to details of child abuse). This does not include indirect non-professional exposure through electronic media, television, movies, or pictures.
I agree its not as serious as what you had to deal with, but I had a similar job screening content and I ended up needing therapy to have a semi-normal life.
Well, those alleged russian videos (if they exist) could reveal what is "acceptable" to the Big Man.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
My arm chair did need the help though. It was deeply depressed and sat in the corner all day.
Emergency room doctors I know are probably all untreated PTSD.
Play Command HQ online
PTSD: Post TRAUMATIC Stress Disorder.
I emphasized the relevant word for you, but hey, if you're not traumatized by watching kids get raped for eight hours a day, five days a week, maybe you should get a job with Microsoft?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Thankfully when I was a BB admin I didn't see any of that. Messed up stuff that got people banned, yes, but nobody was stupid enough to post actual KP on the boards I managed.
I have a friend who worked in law enforcement in "cyber crime" though. Apparently that stuff is part of what he deals with, and you really can tell it takes a toll on a person. I doubt it's like most people imagine. Some people are so fucking depraved that normal people can't even fathom how bad they can be.
It was just a lie spread by some leftist fanatics. Interestingly, many of the same fanatics mourned over Castro who actually imprisoned gay people.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
The first video I saw of Inside Amy Schumer was precisely about this kind of 1-cup-and-2-girls stuff. Hilarious!
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
It's the helplessness and the loneliness that does it, isn't it?
I've never seen any statements by Trump that were negative or derogatory towards LGBT.
I thought that for awhile too, but the selection of Mike Pence to run all domestic policy is about as big a 'fuck you' as you can get to LGBT.
The summary is terribly written, it doesn't explain, clearly, that Microsoft was looking at material on its own servers. Read it through again, it's VERY misleading in that regard.
TFS reads: "could literally view any customer's communications at any time."
Perhaps it should be clarified, since there is a significant legal difference in rifling through employee data vs. customer data. Employees sign documents and accept that usage of corporate systems and networks gives up almost all semblance of privacy. Customers expect privacy to a certain degree because laws demand it.
And unless Microsoft's hiring practices practically invite criminals and child porn addicts, I highly doubt Microsoft justified an entire team to monitor their employees in this way.
just take care of the people that gotta deal with this, i suppose?
It's easier to pretend that it doesn't cause problems. We've had the same problem here, police staff who had to examine pr0n and, in another branch, smoke weed during undercover work, were told they had no basis for a claim because neither pr0n nor weed are harmful to anyone. Which was kinda interesting because the basis for prosecuting people for owning weed was that it was harmful and they needed to be protected from it. Unless they were undercover cops, in which case it wasn't harmful.
The way laws are written. Yes. However, like law enforcement, there is a certain required intent for charges to be filed. Someone who downloads child porn is not the same as someone who is producing it. Much like decriminalizing marijuana or alcohol. The people who have to sit on a bus and smell the skunk-smelling pot smokers aren't going to be charged with consuming cannabis, but the people who actively seek the drug dealers can be, because the crime is about trafficking for sale. That's what CP is. There are producers, dealers and users. For all intents, the way laws are written, are designed only to catch the dumbest people, much like copyright infringement.
It is in fact much easier to charge someone who has child porn with copyright infringement (making unlawful copies of photo or video content of someone without their consent) or voyeurism (eg spying) and the bar is much lower to do that, since you need only evidence that the images were created without the consent of the participant.
Not all "child porn" is actually so. For example, children/preteens/teens may "sext" each other, accidentally (or purposely) their friends, families, to embarrass them or to get them in legal trouble. If the recipient doesn't immediately delete it, or they send it to others, it goes from "viewing child porn" to "distributing child porn" , the latter is considered as bad as murder in some countries courts. If two children sext each other and they are both under 16, there is nothing to charge them with. However if one of their phones is in the possession of their parents, the parent can be. This is why most child porn laws are going to eventually be deleted, along with badly written anti-bullying/trolling laws and will instead be put under copyright law (for the unlawful copying of content without consent of the participant) and the actual "creation" of child porn will go under rape/sexual assault laws to prosecute the actual adults involved with it.
Which goes back to the PTSD thing. Cloudflare is the largest host of child porn, it is unfortunately easy to find because the links are often posted to 8ch , 4chan, reddit, and so forth, but that is just the "common" content that ranges from VHS tapes to stolen webcam/nanny-cam videos that used to proliferate on the alt.binaries.* newsgroups. The less common stuff are things produced in Asia and Europe where age of consent laws are lower or non-existent, and attitudes towards unclothed children aren't considered the same as child porn like it is in North America.
When it comes to PTSD of murder scenes and such, those are posted to the usual places like 4chan/b on purpose, because kids on 4chan are assholes, pirates are assholes, and so forth. People post that stuff because they want to induce PTSD in people. That is why cyberbullying tends to originate entirely from 4chan if not 8ch or reddit.
Why didn't they quit? They knew what they were hired for, then they saw what they saw and still did not quit ... and now they sue?
And MS should just have hired people from 4chan. They don't get PTSD over such stuff.
"Do-moss". It's pronounced "do-moss".
Ahh, the 2 girls vid. Reasonably hardcore, but certainly not the worst.
In St. Louis there is actually a house cleaning company called, wait for it:
Two Ladies and a Bucket
I laugh every time I see one of their cars about.
BlameBillCosby.com
> Hm, what about that exception for technical companies providing "a place" for users and not being responsible what is published on their servers?
I'm not sure what statute you might be referring to. Are you thinking of DMCA safe harbor? DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Service providers aren't liable for *copyright* violations if they follow the prescribed procedure for handling complaints - and following the prescribed procedure normally involves looking at the material which is the subject of the complaint in order to match up the hosted resources with the specificity of the complaint. (Don't take the whole site down if one image is the subject of dispute.)
> Perhaps it should be clarified, since there is a significant legal difference in rifling through employee data vs. customer data.
Legally, in the US, Microsoft is rifling through their own hard drives. Note I'm not suggesting I think this should be the law, I'm stating this *is* the law, as affirmed by many courts over many years. Suppose a hacker, who is neither an employee nor a customer, put malware on the machine. How would Microsoft find malware that bad guys have hidden on their servers? Only by thoroughly looking through the whole drive. Is Microsoft allowed to look through their own servers, in order to find malware, file corruption, deduplication opportunities, or any other reason they want to look at their own equipment? Yes, under US law. There are good arguments for changing that, and there are good arguments for not changing it.
> Employees sign documents and accept that usage of corporate systems and networks
Customers agree to 20 pages of TOS too. Part of the TOS *informs* the customer that MS already has the right to examine their own equipment. Once you hand a document to a service provider, saying "please put this on your web server for me" or "please take this to Gmail, and ask them to take it to Bob", they may look at what you've handed them before they do anything else with it. That's good when bad guys hand them a malware file, asking MS to distribute it.
He chose Mike Pence as running mate. A bigot who once made it a criminal offense for gays to apply for marriage licenses. He was not okay with just denying them: he jailed them.
And Trump put him a heartbeat from the presidency.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No wait....
Think of the adults...
I am so confused now...
They said -- After years of being made to watch the "most twisted" videos on the internet, employees said they suffered severe psychological distress.
Ok, but who will compensate me for watching Tosh.O all those times in came on late night TV?!
And such a company should lead those employees through a thorough psychological assessment before exposing them to all kinds of psychologically disturbing pictures.
And the fact that their bosses, when they mentioned their stress, told them to go out to smoke a cigarette or to play a video game to relax, shows a total disregard for the psychological stress those people were subjected to. I think they might easily win this case, depending however on the question whether they were directed to do this kind of work, or volunteered to do it--which would make it a bit weird...
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
> Doesn't give them any legal right to read it just because it sits on their truck
Did you mean "moral right" and accidentally typed "legal right"? The United States Postal Service is in fact authorized by law to open packages at their sole discretion. UPS and Fedex open packages - you can read about it on their web sites.
Because USPS is part of the government, they are constrained by the fourth amendment and therefore don't open first class letters without a warrant (but don't need a warrant for packages). Microsoft is not the government and is therefore not constrained by the fourth. Like Fedex and UPS, they can and do open packages customers hand them.
> while raping privacy laws
Which privacy laws would those be, exactly?
Frankly, it's very common to think about what you think the law *should* be for any situation and for some reason our brains confuse that with what the law *is*. I'm not sure why, but intelligent people tend to do that for some reason.
This is where if he had a reliable AI that could do the watching, it'd be faster *and* it wouldn't screw up the hapless people who currently have to watch it.
That said, I worry that watching snuff films and porn was why Skynet decided to nuke all the humans.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
The ideal solution is supposed to be "whitelisting" where every pornographic image/video produced has to be registered with the government along with proof of model age, but then you have issues with prior restraint and accurately measuring what is/isn't pornographic.
Those are the issues you see with this solution? You want to register every pornographic image on the Internet and distribute a whitelist of hashes? Checking each image is going to necessitate a rainbow table hunt. And that won't even cover Anthony Weiner's phone. I don't think you've thought this through.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
> As in the same legal protections that require a law enforcement agency to obtain a warrant
That would be the fourth amendment, which says the federal government not unreasonably search our "houses, papers, and effects". It does not say you may not search your own house, and it does not say Microsoft may not search theirs.
The 14th amendment, as interpreted, applies the 4th to state governments. Microsoft is not the government, and it's not your house - it's Microsoft's.
Yeah ogrish type stuff can hurt a person. I could see the gore causing a persons brain to get fucked up, although it might be a temporary effect but the kiddy open stuff I don't think has a negative effect it just gives you a boner. Seriously its just sex like adult porn which everyone uses and doesn't get PTSD from.
https://www.obamasweapon.com/
AI can reduce the amount of amazingly disgusting kinks 4chan tier content and narrow it down to a smaller amounts of human-reviewed content.
Thus concentrating the amount that an individual human reviewer has to see. It actually makes it worse because everything they have to see is some degree of terrible.
nature vs. nurture is far too old and unresolved an argument to be settled by your "superior" comment.
Microsoft could outsource this work to the upstanding community at 4chan. They're experts in this stuff. Hell, they'd probably do it for free.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
it is not something that you get desensitised to very easily
It would probably be worse if you did - I'm not sure which is really worse for your mental health and ability to interact with society.
outsource it to Japan
This would be an incorrect statement and you're basing it on a bill Pence signed into law. http://www.in.gov/legislative/...
This bill reclassified various criminal offenses, including "providing false information to a clerk of the circuit court" from a Class D to Level 6 felony. It didn't create any new crimes or make the crime in question any harsher.
The "crime" of applying for marriage licenses came about from the fact that the online method of applying for marriage licenses did not permit you to select male-male or female-female as a combination as the website was created in accordance with the Indiana law that made marriage between people of the same gender illegal. Thus you had to select one spouse as male and one as female. No one has ever been jailed or even prosecuted for doing such a thing so that claim falls short as well. This crime is not specific to homosexual couples as it is with regard to giving the court false information. A couple that submitted the male spouse as female and the female spouse as male would also be equally guilty of the crime. Perhaps the more damning point against your claim that "A bigot who once made it a criminal offense for gays to apply for marriage licenses" is that homosexual couples could still apply for marriage licenses without breaking the law in question by using the paper form and crossing out the male or female section and writing in the appropriate gender.
But hey, whatever, thanks for perpetuating a falsehood to push your own narrative and belief.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
YOU lack moral fibre pussy
> As in the same legal protections that require a law enforcement agency to obtain a warrant
That would be the fourth amendment, which says the federal government not unreasonably search our "houses, papers, and effects". It does not say you may not search your own house, and it does not say Microsoft may not search theirs.
The 14th amendment, as interpreted, applies the 4th to state governments. Microsoft is not the government, and it's not your house - it's Microsoft's.
You're right. Microsoft is not the Government. A Microsoft employee is granted no more legal authority than a member of the Geek Squad when they go rifling through "their" houses searching through *other* citizens papers and effects, as if they hold that responsibility.
That activity is specifically reserved for a member of law enforcement. Also known as a representative who *is* beholden the uphold the Rights of citizens, including the 4th, who will execute such activity only when reasonably justified.
And when anti-virus/malware systems are automated enough these days to not need human eyes searching through documents, that weak-ass SysAdmin excuse doesn't even justify a search as reasonable to warrant law enforcement involvement to begin with.
Oh for chrissakes, PTSD has been around forever. Ever heard of "shell shock"?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think the "dick-all" part is what's bothering people...
until you got to see the full photo series where it is evident that the liquid is in fact orange juice.
For fucks sake, next time mark your post "SPOILER ALERT". Now you've ruined tubgirl for me and I highly doubt it'll ever work again for me.
I-i mean, this is what a friend of mine asked me to post here. He's real mad.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
It sounds to me like these people are trying to get a retirement plan paid for by Microsoft. It makes sense -- I'm pretty sure people saw some disturbing things -- but I doubt it rises to the level of PTSD. No one with two brain cells to rub together would share anything truly illegal over Hotmail or any of the other platforms provided by Microsoft. Everyone (should) know that free email and social networking sites will mine every single byte of data you give them, and that includes scanning it for terms of service violations.
Also, I think there's different levels of tolerance people have for disturbing stuff. A lot of people can just take it at face value and report the offenders without internalizing it. People who don't have this personality type shouldn't work in a position like this. Microsoft was dumb on two counts -- forcefully transferring employees to this group and not finding something else for them to do when they started showing signs of cracking up. Microsoft's a big company -- I highly doubt there is no wiggle room in the HR budgets to "park" people someplace until you find them a permanent spot after they don't work out on one team. It seems to me like you need to rotate people in and out of this duty to keep them somewhat mentally healthy.
I'm pretty dead on the inside in terms of being negatively affected by things I see, but I don't know if I could do this work full time. It would really depend on what they actually were looking at on a daily basis. I just don't think it rises to the level of "PTSD." Unless people are really more fragile than I think, I have a hard time believing most claims of PTSD, even in combat situations or similar. Unfortunately, unless AI becomes 100% reliable, there are going to have to be groups of people like this who do nothing but trawl through sick stuff so that other people don't have to see it.
That's obviously a riff on Two Men and a Truck.
Cheap storage VM.
In the Geek Squad case (which is not yet decided), the technicians were paid by the GOVERNMENT to search computers belonging to private CITIZENS. Therefore there is a fourth amendment issue.
Microsoft is not an agent of the government, so there is no fourth amendment issue.
Also, Microsoft is not searching your computer, they are searching their own computers.
Right now I'm looking on my computer to see what, if anything, you put anything on my computer. Do you think it's illegal for me to look at what's on my computer? Under what law? Do you think the fourth amendment says I can't look at my own computer? You might want to read the Bill of Rights, if that's your understanding.
Right now, Microsoft is looking on Microsoft's computer to see what, if anything, you put on Microsoft's computer. You may not like that, and you may decide to not use Microsoft's services, but there is no law against Microsoft looking at their own equipment.
Uh huh. Ten years in the Submarine Service and I lack moral fiber. Sorry, try again. You don't even get a copy of the home game.
Using a web-based email client does not mean that email is "on the web."
In the Geek Squad case (which is not yet decided), the technicians were paid by the GOVERNMENT to search computers belonging to private CITIZENS. Therefore there is a fourth amendment issue.
Microsoft is not an agent of the government, so there is no fourth amendment issue. Also, Microsoft is not searching your computer, they are searching their own computers.
Right now I'm looking on my computer to see what, if anything, you put anything on my computer. Do you think it's illegal for me to look at what's on my computer? Under what law? Do you think the fourth amendment says I can't look at my own computer? You might want to read the Bill of Rights, if that's your understanding.
Right now, Microsoft is looking on Microsoft's computer to see what, if anything, you put on Microsoft's computer. You may not like that, and you may decide to not use Microsoft's services, but there is no law against Microsoft looking at their own equipment.
Microsoft is not merely "looking" at their own equipment. They are executing an unreasonable search of customer data in order to find information that potentially can and will be used against you. Using a bullshit not-the-Government excuse does not magically justify that action any more than an excuse to maintain server health does. ISPs can legally indemnify themselves, so this activity isn't even justified under some kind of corporate legal mitigation either. If 3rd parties are rewarded when they discover data or provide leads, that can feed corrupt activities such as planting evidence, which is yet another reason this kind of activity should be scrutinized or banned.
And the Government attempting to outsource work in order to escape the constraints of the 4th Amendment (Best Buy case) is also unjustified, which is one of the reasons the case is under so much scrutiny. I won't be surprised if following the budget trail for the department at Microsoft leads to the same source of funding.
And we wonder why privacy advocates harp on encryption so damn much.
That activity is specifically reserved for a member of law enforcement.
How do you figure that? The 4th amendment certainly doesn't say anything about what non-governmental actors can and cannot do, so you must be getting it from somewhere else.
Have you actually read the terms of service that you agree to when you sign up for an e-mail account from Microsoft? Obviously not. Because if you did, you'd see that you agreed to let them look at pretty much anything that is sent/received/stored on any Microsoft service for the purposes of detecting and reporting: anything illegal, activity that exploits/harms/threatens to harm children, spam, anything that they (in their sole an infinite wisdom) determine to be inappropriate, engage in fraud, accessing Microsoft's or anyone else's services illegally, copyright infringement, and transmitting malware.
First off: Microsoft is not the government. They can search their own property (their servers) at any time for any reason. 4th amendment does not apply
Second: Even if Microsoft was the government (*shudder*), you gave consent for them to search your communications when you signed up. If the police show up at your house and ask "can we search your house?", if you say yes, then anything they find can be used against you...warrant or not.
Third: The indemnification you talk about only applies to copyright. Any other illegal activities that are perpetuated through their services they can be liable for if they are complacent in them happening on their services.
If you don't like Microsoft searching your e-mails for possible illegal content, don't use Microsoft's e-mail services. That is literally your only recourse. I agree with you in that i'd prefer that no one but me reads my e-mails. This is one of the many reasons why I run my own e-mail server. But Microsoft is within their rights to search your e-mails.
Actually, having to see it over and over...it does still haunt me. It has been ten years and it's still hard to think about. The reason I commented was that I can see how seeing people doing terrible things all day can break something in you. I'm sure there are plenty of cases of doctors who are haunted by specific cases. Same with any of the other professions you mentioned. There is regular death and crime, and then there are those cases that are outside the norm that cause trauma. These people were tasked with finding the worst of the worst and had no support? That's asking a lot of a regular person.
Except Muslim is a religious group, and Hispanic (not Mexican...) is a ethnicity, I am not sure how Trump could be racist. Also, as he didn't actually say anything negative about Muslims or Hispanics, it is kind of hard to try and pin him as being against these groups anyways. So no, Trump is not racist, except in the eyes of people who find everyone who doesn't agree with them fully as racists.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?