6 ms·
> There’s no excuse for a company like Microsoft that earned $8.8 billion in profit last quarter to be underfunding safety measures. Perhaps the problem is tha
by dleslie 8y ago
> There’s no excuse for a company like Microsoft that earned $8.8 billion in profit last quarter to be underfunding safety measures.
Perhaps the problem is that there is an excuse: it is likely that they believe that they are neither responsible for the images they index, nor are they beholden to proactively engage with law enforcement.
This is where treading the line between conduit and publisher can bite the corporation who is attempting to do so. While Microsoft does not host the images, it does index them and serve links to them. What's more, they also host thumbnails and metadata that allow the images to be browsed and discovered.
Because they host the thumbnails and metadata, are they not a publisher? They're hardly acting as a disinterested router of opaque data when the data served is stored on their servers and indexed by their algorithms.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoDo you really think Microsoft is showing them on purpose? What's the gain? I can see the loss and not just in PR. IMO, they failed but others failed to properly screen cp, until they fixed it.
- dleslie 8y agoI do not believe there is any purposeful or malicious intent from Microsoft. But that doesn't mean they cannot or should not be held responsible for the data that they host and serve.
- kakarot 8y agoDoesn't reddit serve thumbnails? Wave after wave of recent subreddit bannings due to reddit now believing they will be directly responsible for data they are helping to serve should make one stop to reflect about how exactly such a law would be enforced.
- onetimemanytime 8y agoFine, but responsible in what way? Not like they did it on purpose. Their bots found the images, Bing just forgot to exclude them. Now they're work a lot more to exclude them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Retra 8y agoIf there wasn't a gain, why would they process or index them in the first place? If you don't want to be responsible for the data you process, don't process it.
- feanaro 8y agoBecause classifying huge amounts of content is highly non-trivial. It's not like there are a million employees sifting through every spidered resource and manually deciding whether it should be indexed.
- hrktb 8y agoI think Microsoft is being purposefuly laxer than other engines. Their main intend must be to have more ‘regular’ porn, but child porn will also fall in the basket. What’s the gain? relevance among porn users. Perhaps we can compare this to fishing. Nobody catches dolphins on purpose, but a lot of fishers will use wide nets well knowing that some dolphins will be trapped in.
- cwkoss 8y agoThey may not have intent, but they are clearly acting negligently.
- code_duck 8y agoBy a legal definition of negligence?
- vivekd 8y agoI don't think Microsoft will be using that argument anytime in the near future, the public backlash would be huge and if they were knowingly indexing it they would still be subject to legal liability - heck even if they were unknowingly indexing it they could be liable for negligence if due care wasn't taken to prevent these kinds of images from being circulated. I think Microsoft would argue that there is no real way to prevent these images from being indexed considering that most indexing is automated and it's hard to train their systems to recognize offending images and their human employees can't possibly look through all the images to prevent child porn from being posted.
- dleslie 8y agoExcept they claim to be experts in the field of identifying Child Pornography. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna
- the_duke 8y agoThat's a managed database of KNOWN material though. Very different from categorizing random web content.
- RIMR 8y agoThat's why Google hires people to curate their image database and flag illegal images, so that they can detect them automatically in the future. It looks like Microsoft wasn't doing anything at all to stop new child porn. The fact that their recommendation engine pushes you further in the direction of pedophilia is proof enough that they weren't actively trying to avoid this kind of thing.
- hawaiianbrah 8y agoPretty sure Microsoft does the same. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/11/microsoft-employees-child-abuse-lawsuit-ptsd https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/11/microsoft...
- hacknat 8y agoHaving child pornography in your pocession is a crime. If MSFT has indexed without showing any good faith effort to avoid indexing then the DOJ can and should prosecute them for the felony that it is.
- arbitrage 8y agoNo. That's not how it works. Corporations are not people, regardless of the Citizens United ruling. The laws don't apply the same way.
- hacknat 8y agoThey can be charged civilly for the equivalent (child endangerment or something).
- arbitrage 8y agoYeah, that's not the part that I'm disagreeing with. Specifically: > If MSFT has indexed without showing any good faith effort to avoid indexing then the DOJ can and should prosecute That's not how it works. At all. That part right there.
- crankylinuxuser 8y agoFor statutory crimes, this is how it works for people. "We don't care the reason or mitigating circumstances you have, or even if you did it. You have the $thing , so you're at fault." (The -1's, this is how statutory crimes work. I'm stating a fact, not making ethical determinations about it. I personally think that mens rea absolutely needs to be incorporated at a minimum.)
- dmurray 8y agoThe phrase you are looking for is "strict liability offence".
- 8y ago
- Bhilai 8y agoI dont think its that. I think they just did a shitty job filtering this content.
- johnchristopher 8y agoI don't see how torrent linking is a crime and Bing indexing and offering this kind of content is not. Especially when the anti-piracy lobbying crowd insisted on "what about the children ?".
- Thaxll 8y agoMaking $8.8B in profit doesn't mean you're able to solve any technical challenges.