| You are actually creating a false dichotomy here. There are more sides to this. And you are creating (as said a false) black and white image here. I strongly believe that nobody wants to further victimize people by publicly showing images of their abuse. And I believe very strongly that putting hundreds of millions of people under blanket general suspicion is a dangerous first step. Imagine if every bank had to search all documents in safe deposit boxes to see if people had committed tax evasion (or stored other illegal things like blood diamonds obtained with child labor). That would be an equivalent in the physical world. Now add to this, as discussed elsewhere here, that the database in question contains not only BIlder of victims, but also perfectly legal images. This can lead to people "winning" a house search because they have perfectly legal data stored in their cloud. Furthermore, this means that a single country's understanding of the law is applied to a global user community. From a purely legal point of view, this is an interesting problem. And yes: I would like to see effective measures to make the dissemination of such material more difficult. At the same time, however, I see it as difficult to use a tool for this purpose that is not subject to any control by the rule of law and cannot be checked if the worst comes to the worst. |
A great deal of skepticism is being given to the NCMEC database in these comments, which I'm surprised by as from what information I have I think this is being exaggerated. At the same time we have no idea whether Apple would even be using that database or another one that they may have created themselves.