Posted by speckx 8 hours ago
The VAST majority of “CSAM” is consensually created and exchanged by teens. Their future selves and their parents form this pressure group attacking everyone’s liberty and privacy to try to undo the downsides of choices they made themselves with full knowledge of what could happen.
The criminal and disgusting tail end of this type of material deserves the worst of consequences for the perpetrators and all the support in the world for the victims, but these are mostly - you guessed it - poor and unprivileged children from far away places and they certainly can’t put this much pressure on apple
I wrote to the rep and explained my concerns. I wholeheartedly agreed with the intent of the law, but the code was buggy. To my surprise, he wrote back in horror to say he hadn’t considered that and pulled the bill immediately. I’m proud of having done that.
I’m 100% pro yeeting child pornographers into the sun. I still don’t want to throw kids in prison or remove all traces of a right to privacy in our haste to sun-yeet them.
The one messy corner of this is the "strict liability" for this type of material. An underage kid can take a nude photo, send it to an adult, and then the adult can criminally liable for just having it, even if he deleted it as soon as he saw it. Either both parties involved in handing something for which there is "strict liability' need to be held accountable, or "strict liability" has to be changed so a person isn't liable if he deletes or reports the material as soon as he first becomes aware of it. And this isn't likely to happen because it would provide a plausible defense for every one criminally charged.
AFAIK that's more or less how it works today as a practical matter. The law recognizes this situation as an affirmative defense, but does not make it impossible to be charged.
To be an affirmative defense it has to be reported immediately or destroyed, constitute three images or less, and not be sent to anyone [other than law enforcement]. Interestingly, NCMEC doesn't necessarily count for that -- if you find yourself in this situation and you want to report something, call your local police.
I'm sure smarter people than me have sussed this out and can explain why it's a good thing, but it sits wrong with me. We can put the subject matter aside for a second: I don't think I could convict someone for having something happen to them, regardless of what the law says. Let's say drug possession was a strict liability law (and maybe it is for all I know). Finding a baggy of meth on the corner of a farmer's lot would mean that, technically, he was guilty of possession and had to prove that it wasn't really is. That's nuts. And looping back to the subject at hand, if the only evidence that someone possessed CSAM was their email inbox, without proof that it was solicited? They want me on their jury.
There should never be a circumstance where someone can't report something that happened to them to the police without a legitimate fear of being arrested. That's bad for the person, and it's bad for society.
But if their hard drive has folders grouped by age or something, prepare the solar catapult.
While on statistics, I wonder, are there reliable statistics about child abuse of different types? Studying correlations with other social metrics, like sex education, liberal/conservative, policies regarding prostitution, and others can provide support for/against decisions.
Not that I hope these will impact people's and governments' choices, but I want to challenge my intuitions.
Why would some adults find kids sexually attractive? Is it abusive/aggressive behavior manifesting itself in sexuality? Or is it sexuality channeled in the wrong direction? If it's the second, is it out of desperation, and would happen less if the culture makes it easier for them to satisfy their needs with adults, or would it happen regardless? On the victim's side, are the shy and less social ones more in danger, or the socially active ones? From my social scientist friends I hear a lot that most child sexual abuse is domestic. What are measures that a society can take to prevent these, without turning the society into a surveillance state, which will ultimately harm everyone more, including the children? What can be done to make sure children speak up, so that such behavior is dealt with at the beginning (and maybe while the more terrible things have not happened yet), and not turn into a multi-year childhood trauma?
What are signs (and early signs) on the abuser's side and the child's side? How to deal with these signs?
The real question is what happens when a horny teenager sends another a nude. There definitely have been insane cases where they get stitched up for creating child porn. I don't know if that's the normal outcome today though.
It was not a tool to identify private images as being underage. That’s an impossible task.
Just ask the dad who was investigated for taking pictures of his toddler for the doctor: https://www.koffellaw.com/blog/google-ai-technology-flags-da...
In theory, modern vision language models could classify human nudity and sexual activity very thoroughly. But every model I have tried is reluctant to clearly describe what is notable about sexualized/nude images. The models are deliberately under-exposed to nude and sexualized content during training and further RLHF'd away from generating straightforward descriptions of such images.
Models also occasionally hallucinate WTF captions for ordinary adult sexual activity. I recently ran a baseline test with frames extracted from adult videos and about 1/3000 frames was mis-captioned as involving a child according to Gemma 4 12b.
I don’t have any ideas for a solution, but I suspect that the heightened focus on CSAM is really compensating for the fact that we don’t have solutions for revenge porn.
The only way I can see this working is that people in explicit images need to publicly declare their intent for who can see the images (maybe a hash of the image content and the name of the person who can see that content) and then when the courts prosecute revenge porn the intent can be referenced to see if it was meant to be shared or not. There are still issues in that there is no proof that the person being accused of revenge porn actually distributed the images vs the defendant actually sending the images to other, or the image was leaked by a hack.
I think the best thing we can do is try and educate teens on the dangers of revenge porn like we do on the consequences of having sex. We cannot stop teens from having sex or taking nudes, but we can at least try to educate them as best we can.
Our legal systems are not built to deal with that mess, and it may hang around your neck for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, the law is very explicit, leaving barely any avenue for the courts to drag us out of the mess, and politicians - even if they are actually interested in the topic in the first place - won't touch that area with a ten foot pole for fear of getting blamed a pedophile themselves.
[1] https://www.n-tv.de/panorama/KI-treibt-Jugendporno-Fallzahle...
I'm questioning the parent post's contention that the "vast majority" of CSAM falls into this bucket.
Yes, poor and unprivileged children can't really defend themselves here, but this is the system working to find some legal mechanism to do what it can, as a more powerful force. Protecting people from exploitation is a good use of government. If this was shot down for legal reasons, OK, the system is working and I hope there is a way to expand protections that fits into our system.
Once again, someone (in this case, the judge of this case) asks if we can meet in the middle on whether or not private communications are actually private.
To be clear: this is not a limitation of nerds' imagination. This is a limitation of physics. A person is either party to a communication (and thus can decrypt it) or is not (and thus cannot). If you demand Apple scan encrypted photos for CSAM, what you are demanding is that Apple be party to every communication done with an iPhone. There is no middle ground on encryption, there will never be a middle ground on encryption, and I will hold this truth on my deathbed.
There is no "encrypted but crackable" - if the CIA can crack it at all, we're only a few years away from some kid's gaming rig doing the same thing. There is no "secure golden key" - if there was, you could buy it in the same section of Amazon that sells copies of the TSA master key that opens all luggage locks.
Personally, the next time a government demands decryption keys, I think Apple should just set all iCloud photo libraries in that country to public and say "Sorry, your politicians made private photos illegal, take it up with them". Obviously, telegraph this far in advance and give users time to actually delete their cloud-hosted photos first. But definitely do not pretend like you can keep a secret with a government bureaucracy of hundreds of thousands of people.
But then again, Apple also capitulated (good meaning) to the EU on third-party app distribution, so Apple has a lot less of a spine than they let on. At least Google actually stayed out of China.