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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.
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.
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.
What you're talking about doesn't even come close to what those guys are talking about. There's a difference between goatse and tubgirl and watching an infant have sexual acts performed on them. I'd describe it more, but I've tried to block it out my memory, and even now there's some things you just can't unsee. While I'm here, I'd also like to point out that when people equate drawn porn to actual child pornography, I immediately disregard that person's opinion because these people don't know what they are talking about.
Source: I've removed illegal content off 4chan.
PS: I'm not sure if the folks at Microsoft got to appreciate the legal differences between what kinds of depictions of animal torture/murder are and are not legal. It's actually very clearly defined!
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!)
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. . . .
"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.
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.
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...
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.)
Great, M$ can fire them for viewing child porn instead of paying for their psych treatment . This is a corporate win-win.
Private citizens maybe but I think e-mail and cloud storage providers should be treated more as "common carriers" and only respond to legit legal requests for such data rather than enthusiastically embarking on witch hunts to do law enforcement dirty work. What you're sort of advocating would be like the post office reading all of your sealed mail in just in case you might be a pedophile and letting law enforcement know you might be a pothead.
Why shouldn't I expect the same rights that I enjoy (theoretically, not in practice) with telephones and snail mail to carry over into the digital realm? The USPS is govt run in name only these days and is more of a private organization. Would you be cool with UPS searching all of your packages because a computer said there could be pictures of underage titties in there somewhere?
What this boils down to is the government is using private companies to circumvent the constitution using the same old "think of the children" tripe that brought us the drug war with a double-dose of tyranny and it's sickening.
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...
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.
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