[lclarkmichalek]

Your question doesn't seem to be "What if they're mistaken?"; it seems you are more asking "will they stop at child porn?". Anyway, I'd agree with jfoutz, in saying that society has dealt with these problems before, and has managed to create a fairly good line as to where something must be reported, and where a person's privacy becomes more important. That's not to say they will manage to create that line again, but it's also not to say they won't. Regardless, I don't think it's an unavoidable slippery slope.

As for "What if they're mistaken?", well I highly doubt anyone will be convicted off the basis of an automated image recognition tool alone. If they are mistaken from time to time, then the person will probably have a warrant (ha) issued for their email, and any investigation would follow normally. If they're mistaken very often (i.e. the PhotoDNA implementation turns out to be shit), then the police (or whoever is receiving these reports) will probably stop caring, and nothing will have changed.

[PhasmaFelis]

> As for "What if they're mistaken?", well I highly doubt anyone will be convicted off the basis of an automated image recognition tool alone.

"Convicted" isn't the fear, post-9/11. The fear is getting put on a secret government watch list and being harassed for the rest of your life with no chance to ever clear your name, or even to be told why you're being screwed.

[deong]

That's a legitimate concern, but the root problem is the existence of secret government watch lists free of oversight and lacking any transparent or available process for being inadvertently put on one.

If we grant that such a list is wise to have, then sure, let's focus as much effort as possible on making sure that we don't put innocent people on those lists. But I'd much rather focus my efforts on not having the lists in the first place.

[lclarkmichalek]

Isn't that mainly terrorism, not paedophilia? Anyway, at least in this case, the tip was sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which, being a private non profit, doesn't seem too closely associated with the NSA/DHS/whatever government organisation you believe maintains these lists.

[throwaway0010]

"Isn't that mainly terrorism, not paedophilia?"

It's nothing at all. Plenty of innocent people are on those lists having done nothing.

That the pretext is terrorism is irrelevant.

[DanBC]

The UK version - the Internet Watch Foundation - is also a charity but you'd be a foolish UK ISP to ignore what they say.

https://www.iwf.org.uk/

[lclarkmichalek]

The UK equivalent would probably be the NSPCC. If Google had a tip of an individual person distributing these images they would not contact the IWF. That would be for a website that was distributing these images.

[DanBC]

In the UK the IWF provide information about what to block and take reports about hosted images.

CEOP are the group that Google would report people to.

http://ceop.police.uk/

[PhasmaFelis]

> Isn't that mainly terrorism, not paedophilia?

"Terrorism" was just how they learned they could get away with it. Having established that, it's now any damn thing they want.

[TehCorwiz]

I'm not claiming a slippery slope. They already are scanning all emails, we know this for certain.

And as for "What if they're mistaken?" There's a fair amount of fallout from simply being accused of a crime. Between arrest, jail-time waiting for arraignment, bail, legal fees, news coverage which will forever attach your name to whatever it was...etc. The question squarely is "What if they're wrong?"

[lclarkmichalek]

You are claiming slippery slope. They've reported child porn cases, and you are worrying about the possibility they could begin reporting tax fraud and other more minor crimes.