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by smsm42 1778 days ago
I'm not buying it. If you can recognize what it is, enough to be able to be sure, you're exposed to it. If not, you're just guessing - and your guess is heavily biased towards confirming what the machine said, because Apple spend $MASSIVE_AMOUNT on this technology, and who are you to question it based on a blurry picture? Also, you'd be saving children, and if you're wrong (which you're likely not - remember, industry-leading AI!) - well, the police surely will find that out very quickly and everything will be fine.

It's not like it's the first time such systems are built. We have a cases of Big Social banning people for random stuff and then saying "it was a technical error" when the noise in the media is strong enough. We have chess channels banned for racist hatespeech. Only this time the question is not whether you will be denied the opportunity to post cat pictures on facewitter for a week. It's pretty much the most shameful accusation one can be subjected to in our society. Once the press gets hold of it - and it'd get hold of it the minute the police does - there's no coming back from it for the person affected (well, maybe if they are Hunter Biden, but not otherwise). And all that will be hinged on an anonymous drone looking at a blurry picture?

1 comments

> I'm not buying it. If you can recognize what it is, enough to be able to be sure, you're exposed to it. If not, you're just guessing

That’s a misunderstanding of what is happening. The reviewer doesn’t have to see whether the visual derivative looks like child porn. They only have to see whether it matches the visual derivative of the child porn image that the hash matched.

So they'd just compare two small very blurry thumbnails? Not sure that makes it any better.
It’s not literal blurring - it’s a transform that means you don’t see the actual image, but you do see features and detail that lets you easily tell two source images apart.

The point is that you aren’t looking to see if there is porn in the image. You are looking to seem if the image matches the porn image.

It’s a good mechanism.