Pogue Mahone
The caf's Camus.
Listened to a Sam Harris podcast which brings this issue front and centre. He was talking to a journalist from the NYT who’s done some incredible work on an absolute EXPLOSION of child porn online (from 170,000 reported incidents in the US in 2007 to 17,000,000 in 2017) The journalist thinks the obsession with privacy is making far too easy to share child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online (that’s apparently a better phrase than “child pornography”). The tech companies aren’t doing enough to help law enforcement and Facebook’s plans to end to end encrypt Mesanger could have catastrophic consequences.
One of the journalist’s suggestions was that certain platforms should never be allowed to be fully encrypted. If you use Facebook messenger then you should expect your data to be trawled through by alogrithms designed to identify problematic material. The problem with Facebook is that predators can identify and target young kids and trick them into sharing inappropriate images, then blackmail them into even worse transgressions. Apparently this is a huge - and growing - problem. He says Facebook should tell everyone that if they want an encrypted chat to use their other platform, whatsapp. The benefit of whatsapp being it can’t be used to cold call strangers after viewing their online profiles.
Seems reasonable to me.
What does everyone else think?
One of the journalist’s suggestions was that certain platforms should never be allowed to be fully encrypted. If you use Facebook messenger then you should expect your data to be trawled through by alogrithms designed to identify problematic material. The problem with Facebook is that predators can identify and target young kids and trick them into sharing inappropriate images, then blackmail them into even worse transgressions. Apparently this is a huge - and growing - problem. He says Facebook should tell everyone that if they want an encrypted chat to use their other platform, whatsapp. The benefit of whatsapp being it can’t be used to cold call strangers after viewing their online profiles.
Seems reasonable to me.
What does everyone else think?
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