
“Child Abusers Run Rampant as Tech Companies Look the Other Way” - Glyptodon
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-child-sex-abuse.htm
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habitue
Those evil tech companies! What would possibly be the purpose of lumping all
tech companies together as if there's some collective criminal guilt tech
companies must share. It makes sense for something like cigarette companies or
oil companies, since the collective noun is based on the bad thing they share.
In the case of "tech"... come on! This describes a huge range of companies
with completely different business models. Is MongoDB looking the other way at
child abusers? How about Cisco? Is Salesforce?

Sorry for the rant, this is just so careless and sloppy. It's like referring
to a specific bad thing that was done as being done by "the media". No, that
specific news outlet did that. Not the media as a whole

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SpicyLemonZest
I dunno. Reading through the article, it seems like that really is the thesis
- the authors think every company which stores or processes data, which may
well be the majority of tech companies, should be scanning it to make sure it
doesn't contain illicit material. Their examples of specific companies which
aren't doing enough scanning range from search engines to cloud storage to
enterprise video conferencing.

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suizi
Sigh. I mean, they have a point, but what do they really expect tech companies
to do? There are some obvious cases where Google obviously does something
stupid and Microsoft is more than a little oblivious as to what is going on on
their search engine.

It's not like this is the first thing someone thinks about when building a
product however like Dropbox or AWS and AWS is vitally important to quite a
number of businesses.

Sure, they could have moderators scour through all of that, but how many trade
secrets and private documents will they see in the process? Insider threat and
corporate espionage is a real problem, could anyone trust them after that?
There have even been some cases where classified documents from the Department
of Defence have turned up on AWS (there are a few news articles which attest
to this), although perhaps it should not have been there in the first place.

There are also all the personal photos and all sorts of embarrassing things on
someone's Dropbox account, unless they plan on getting some sort of warrant,
then they really shouldn't be rummaging through all of that.

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drallison
The correct link is:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-
child-sex-abuse.html?searchResultPosition=1)

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Canada
What a terrible article. The thrust is that it's bad that:

\- Facebook leads in reporting, with 45M possible cases, but apparently even
that isn't trying hard enough

\- Facebook is moving toward E2E for messaging

\- Amazon doesn't intrude on customer data

\- Dropbox, Microsoft and Google do not sufficiently intrude on their users
data

Imagine AWS started scanning your VMs for digital contraband... How many
customers would actually put up with that?

~~~
mirimir
Right. And even if all those companies found everything that goes through
their systems, they'd arguably accomplish nothing more than catching the
punters. Mostly kids and old men.

Most people who create and distribute child sexual abuse imagery don't likely
operate on the open Internet. They're in private forums on Tor onion services.
Along with I2P and Freenet.

So this is mostly propaganda to build support for the Panopticon.

~~~
Canada
Well, apparently they use mainstream services quite a lot, even openly where
search engines can index it. I think what goes unsaid here is that Facebook
reported a lot of it to the authorities and they don't do much about it
anyway.

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mirimir
I'm not arguing that people don't share and save that stuff on mainstream
services. I'm arguing that 99% of them are just looking. And that most of the
ones who are actually abusing are much harder to find.

So what the Panopticon will accomplish is saturating the system with punters,
with no substantial impact on abuse.

That, and nuking privacy online. Which, I argue, is the real goal.

~~~
Canada
Yeah I completely agree that spying on us all is the real goal whenever
politicians and high level law enforcement officials bring this topic up.

People have been sexually abusing children before we had electricity let alone
the internet, so even if there was never another abuse image posted the actual
abuse will continue.

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18monthsin
I can't imagine why they look the other way, do child abusers by ads?

