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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

> In an effort to combat child pornography, providers like Facebook and Google automatically screen all photos for the presence of children and bare skin.

The presumption that childhood nudity needs to be screened in such a way is, itself, cringey and creepy and perhaps not without a hint of pedophilia.

> The algorithm detects the content whether it’s posted online or shared via a messaging app like WhatsApp.

OK, so what is "the algorithm?" Where can it be tested and audited?

And how do authorities acquire content send in a WhatsApp message? We just went over this yesterday, didn't we? wcathcart, any response to this?

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Our daughter had serious skin issues for years, and my wife and I shared numerous photographs of her.

The idea of a pack of ... auditing my personal messages and photos to my wife is abhorrent.

What we need is actual police doing actual police work, and actually judges putting actual pedophiles away for life. Not stalking normal people.

But, I guess cowardice is alive and well - normals don’t shoot cops and judges in the face, so they’re easy targets to satisfy the “just do something” vote.

And i was a competative swimmer. Nobody should fault my parents for posting images of me in a speedo, nor should i hesitate from posting them myself.

They're not screening for kids and bare skin specifically. It's just a first heuristic to narrow down the pool of photos that conceivably might be child porn to something that human investigators can feasibly check.

Per the article, 90% of the kids-and-bare-skin photos received are found to be totally innocuous once a human looks at them; no action is taken, and the photos and associated personal info are removed from police computers.

Except I'm not comfortable with my families photographs being screened by a third party that I don't know or have met, and this occurring explicitly without my knowledge.

So to stop child pornography an all-seeing third party vets my families photographs even when shared privately via WhatsApp or similar? That's fucked.

Stop using Facebook.

Like.....what do you expect?

I'm not trying to blame you here but since you're on this website I assume you're more generally knowledgable about stuff happening. We've known about variations of this for so long.

There is a difference between knowing that Facebook posts are screened and thinking that private, "end-to-end encrypted" messages are being screened (if true).

They've basically provided no proof it's end to end encrypted properly.

Heck even Facebook has a private message system they claim it's e2ee.

My naive assumption is that there are no peer-to-peer, or hosted, apps in the stores that aren’t screened/intercepted by someone.

> a human looks at them

That's the problem most people have with this.

I’m not sure how anyone could defend this part without cringing at the implications for privacy.

> It's just a first heuristic to narrow down the pool of photos that conceivably might be child porn to something that human investigators can feasibly check.

Yes, but it's an invasion of privacy to even have someone looking at pictures that weren't shared publicly. Basically what you've just said is that 90% of the time they are invading innocent peoples privacy.

Child porn is really bad, the right to privacy is also really important, I'm not convinced they've made the right decision here.

> The idea of a pack of ... auditing my personal messages

What fills in the blank left by your ellipsis is one of the real points to be made in light of this story.

We have to ask: who is fighting to have this job? In fact, who is this job tailor-made for in the first place?

It seems to me that there is no (or, at most, very little) legitimate security interest being served by this process. But the opportunity created for someone who enjoys looking at these sorts of pictures - and doing it under cover of law - is absolutely obvious.

As someone who was raised a nudist this is actually hilarious and if I was a kid now my parents would've probably got a visit from the police.

Ugh.

The land of the free.

They are most likely talking about PhotoDNA (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA)

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