CSAM also doesn't prevent children from being exploited. It's an archive of past abuse. The police should focus and finding creators of such abhorrent material and put them in prison.
1. CSAM production may be incentivized by consumers (either because they pay for it or because they serve to encourage the producers).
2. CSAM may (as, famously, with Backpage) be an advertisement for real-world meet ups and further abuse.
3. Having pictures of one’s own abuse further disseminated is itself abusive and morally wrong.
Obviously producers should also be prosecuted, but while I do think the American approach is in many ways informed by puritanical beliefs, there are perfectly rational reasons to pursue the spread of such material.
Getting random people to pay for content is a pretty hard thing to do, and I’d assume illegal content wouldn’t just be taking credit cards either, so the barrier is way higher. The conversion rate looks to me to be abysmally low, and we’re trying to police the whole internet for that.
Legal porn seems like a strong counterexample.
sure but people should also keep in mind that pursuit could massively backfire, like in the case of backpage, where the shutdown of the site actually made is HARDER to find and recuse children being abused because now the traffickers are using more secure, more underground platforms...
This characterization of Backpage diverges significantly from the realities of the site uncovered by authorities [1]. Choice excerpt:
> "Information provided to us by [FBI Agent Steve] Vienneau and other members of the Innocence Lost Task Force confirm that, unlike virtually every other website that is used for prostitution and sex trafficking, Backpage is remarkably responsive to law enforcement requests and often takes proactive steps to assist in investigations," wrote Catherine Crisham and Aravind Swaminathan, both assistant U.S. attorneys for the Western District of Washington, in the April 3 memo to Jenny Durkan, now mayor of Seattle and then head federal prosecutor for the district. Vienneau told prosecutors that "on many occasions," Backpage staff proactively sent him "advertisements that appear to contain pictures of juveniles" and that the company was "very cooperative at removing these advertisements at law enforcement's request."
> "Even without a subpoena, in exigent circumstances such as a child rescue situation, Backpage will provide the maximum information and assistance permitted under the law," wrote Crisham and Swaminathan.
1. https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme...
They truly did good work and were an unfortunate casualty of a political pissing contest.
(2) and (3) can be handled by enforcing a delay of, say, 15 years between CSAM being produced and it entering the database (and censoring any identifying information, of course), and by giving people the choice to opt out before their pictures are added.
The problem isn't CSAM being in the database, but being disseminated in public. The database is designed to reduce public dissemination.
Good luck with that. They are in Russia/Eastern Europe, behind mafias.
Personally, I've been heading toward a life more free of the internet and technology. This move by Apple is speeding that up.