[jacquesm]

> How can you even test such a service legally?

It's actually quite well designed and questions such as these were definitely taken into account during the design phase.

I came up with a similar scheme about 15 years ago (as a result of operating that file sharing service) and proposed to the local LE that we set up a service where a 'fingerprint' of an image could be tested against known bad images, and if an image tested positive it would be flagged for review (and on an exact match it would be automatically banned).

The local law enforcement officer thought it was a great idea but it would never fly because even the hashes of the images were considered off-limits for sharing with others and they'd have to share their database of hashes with me if I were to set this up (free of charge).

Eventually MS came up with PhotoDNA and they're too big to ignore.

[pmarreck]

So basically (probability of legal entity being a good actor) x (size of legal entity) must be >= some large number.

sigh, that's still less than ideal.

[jacquesm]

Agreed, but given the fact that this feeds into the legal system in a fairly direct way and that I'm only a 'one man shop' by their definition it makes good sense to insist on doing business with a larger party.

Where it goes haywire is that they then have to trust all the employees of that larger party as well but that's logic rather than CYA.

[pmarreck]

Yes, surprisingly I am more deeply concerned with the logic bit, lol