A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him For It

This is correct. However, many websites/newspapers/magazines/etc. love to get more clicks with sensational headlines that are technically true, but can be easily interpreted as something much more sinister/exciting. This headline is a great example of it. While you interpreted it correctly, or claim to at least, there will be many people that initially interpret it the second way you described. Me among them, admittedly. And the people deciding on the headlines are very much aware of that. Therefore, the headline can absolutely be deemed misleading, for while it is absolutely a correct statement, there are less ambiguous ways to phrase it.

The inclusion of "found" indicates that it is important to the action taken by Google, would be my interpretation.

You would think, but none of these companies actually make their own dataset, they buy from third parties.

Oh hell no. That's a privacy nightmare to he abused like hell.

Also that wouldn't work at all what you say.

Also, pay me exhorbitant amounts of tax-payer money to ineffectually enforce this. For the children.

Fuck you, and everything you stand for.

No need to go that far. If we just require one valid photo ID for TikTok, the children will finally be safe.

CSAM stands for "material". Adding "image" specifies what kind of material it is.

I think they’ve always been like this for some of their posts, and honestly I’m considering getting a paid subscription to support them. Sucks, but they’ve been putting out quality content in exchange for your email address and some metrics - I’d call it a fair trade.

They are doing it because of AI scraper. But that is for some time now already

It is legitimately free after you sign up, I get their reasoning but is kinda annoying.

While I agree with Section 230 in theory, it is often only used in practice to protect megacorps. For example, many Lemmy instances started getting spammed by CSAM after the Reddit API migration. It was very clearly some angry redditors who were trying to shut down instances, to try and keep people on Reddit.

But individual server owners were legitimately concerned that they could be held liable for the CSAM existing on their servers, even if they were not the ones who uploaded it. The concern was that Section 230 would be thrown out the window if the instance owners were just lone devs and not massive megacorps.

Especially since federation caused content to be cached whenever a user scrolled past another instance’s posts. So even if they moderated their own server’s content heavily (which wasn’t even possible with the mod tools that existed at the time), then there was still the risk that they’d end up cacheing CSAM from other instances. It led to a lot of instances moving from federation blacklists to whitelists instead. Basically, default to not federating with an instance, unless that instance owner takes the time to jump through some hoops and promises to moderate their own shit.

Not to create an argument, which isn't my intent, as certainty there may be a thought such as, "scraping as it stands is good because of the simplification and 'benefit'". Which, sure, it's easiest to wide net and absorb, to simply the concept, at least as I'm also understanding it.

Yet, maybe it is the process of scraping, and also absorbing into databases including AI, which is a worthwhile point of conversation. Maybe how we've been doing something isn't the continued 'best course' for a situation.

Undeniably, more minutely monitoring what is scraped and stored creates large quantities, and large in scope, of questions and obstacles, but, maybe having that conversation is where things should go.

Thoughts?

Oh my, yes, you are correct. That was sort of knee jerk, as opposed to it being the reporting party's burden somehow. I simply cannot understand the legal gymnastics needed to punish your customers for this sort of thing; I'm tired but I feel like this is not exactly an uncommon occurrence. Anyways let us all learn from my mistake and do not be rash and curtail your own freedoms.

Who do you think the FBI would contract to do the work anyway 😬

Maybe not Google but it would sure be some private company. Our government doesn’t do stuff itself almost ever. It hires the private sector

Google wants to be able to recognize and remove it. They don't want the FBI all up in their business.

Google isn't the only service checking for csam. Microsoft (and other file hosting services, likely) also have methods to do this. This doesn't mean they also host csam to detect it. I believe their checks use hash values to determine if a picture is already clocked as being in that category.

This has existed since 2009 and provides good insight on the topic, used for detecting all sorts of bad category images:

https://technologycoalition.org/news/the-tech-coalition-empowers-industry-to-combat-online-child-sexual-abuse-with-expanded-photodna-licensing/

This guy is into some really weird stuff, and not the normal henti that everyone else is asking for.

It's also more distinct. CP has many potential definitions. CSAM only has the one I'm aware of.