“We can’t fight child porn on our platform because it is less moral to run a scanner that may produce false positives and either accept that this may result in blocking some content that isn’t child porn OR pay someone to look at content and verify whether or not it is child porn, so instead we just do the far more moral thing of allowing and profiting from the distribution of child porn" is an interesting, if not exactly convincing, argument.
In quite a few countries, a false positive can lead to someone getting put in prison
That can only happen if it is either (1) used by government, or (2) used by private entities in a process flow that includes reports to government.
"There exist countries with criminal justice systems with weak enough standards of proof that a false positive on a scan alone would result in prison", even if 100% true, is not a justification for a firm not making efforts to block child porn distribution on its networks. (It is, OTOH, a justification for working to reform the criminal justice systems in those countries, but that is rather far from the topic here.)
Intentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime, but not catching it is not a crime. If you think it's stupid, lobby Congress to change the law.
Intentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime
The entire argument for why verification was even an issue is that the allegedly the scan is not sufficient reason to actually believe that something is child pornoography. But whether or reviewing such a report may or may not be a crime in some jurisdiction somewhere on Earth, the certainty that arguments like that would detract from the point is the reason that of the two (moral and legal) issues raised in the post I responded to, I only said that one of them was ridiculous, and it wasn't the legal one.
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“We can’t fight child porn on our platform because it is less moral to run a scanner that may produce false positives and either accept that this may result in blocking some content that isn’t child porn OR pay someone to look at content and verify whether or not it is child porn, so instead we just do the far more moral thing of allowing and profiting from the distribution of child porn" is an interesting, if not exactly convincing, argument.
In quite a few countries, a false positive can lead to someone getting put in prison, entirely without any human viewing said image.
It's all a matter of 'the image hash was on the database, therefore OP is guilty. 10 years incarceration'.
I wouldn't want to be enabling such a system.
That can only happen if it is either (1) used by government, or (2) used by private entities in a process flow that includes reports to government.
"There exist countries with criminal justice systems with weak enough standards of proof that a false positive on a scan alone would result in prison", even if 100% true, is not a justification for a firm not making efforts to block child porn distribution on its networks. (It is, OTOH, a justification for working to reform the criminal justice systems in those countries, but that is rather far from the topic here.)
Intentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime, but not catching it is not a crime. If you think it's stupid, lobby Congress to change the law.
The entire argument for why verification was even an issue is that the allegedly the scan is not sufficient reason to actually believe that something is child pornoography. But whether or reviewing such a report may or may not be a crime in some jurisdiction somewhere on Earth, the certainty that arguments like that would detract from the point is the reason that of the two (moral and legal) issues raised in the post I responded to, I only said that one of them was ridiculous, and it wasn't the legal one.
NCMEC is the only organization legally allowed to view child porn. For everyone else, they have no legal way to verify.