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iPhone's Adult Content Filter Blocks Anything 'Asian'

renewiltord 6y ago
I could have sworn I've seen a headline like this repeatedly over the years. Maybe its sporadic reoccurrence reveals that people don't really use the Adult Content Filter because this is such an obviously nonsensical thing to have, especially in the Bay Area, where these guys have their HQ. Like there are so many reasons you'd use the word Asian here.
- astura 6y ago
  Its called the Scunthorpe problem. The name comes from an early incident where AOL filters prevented users from Scunthorpe, England from creating accounts. (because of "cunt" in "Scunthorpe" if that wasn't obvious) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem Few years before the AOL incident I recall watching a news story about internet filters (in schools... I believe) blocking information on Superbowl 30, which is stylized with roman numerals, as Superbowl XXX. I remember this 25 years later because it was so amusing to me. Still is. (XXX is sometimes used to denote sexual content.) Oh, hey! Wikipedia actually provides a citation for the Superbowl XXX incident!!
  - thereare5lights 6y ago
    It's close not but quite. That problem is describing terms where the issue is a substring of the term itself. Here, the issue is due to the gross sexual fetishization of Asians in western culture. That is, it's context based, not term based.
    - astura 6y ago
      No, it is the Scunthorpe problem. There's no rule the "banned" term has to be a substring, just the filter blocks it because in a different context it would violate the content policy. >The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. They go on to give examples such as a profanity filter blocking the word "bone" at a paleontology conference and a user banned for saying "great tits" when referring to the bird.
      - thereare5lights 6y ago
        No, it isn't. From the article > The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue. Specifically > because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning.
    - worker767424 6y ago
      > gross sexual fetishization of Asians in western culture No need to pass so much judgement.
      - thereare5lights 6y ago
        What?
        justnotworthit 6y ago
        No need to pass so much judgement.
  - 867-5309 6y ago
    sort of related - I recently had an incident with a school app where children can upload and showcase work, leave messages for parents, etc. a message was signed by a seven-year-old as "love from {child's name}.xxx" - three kisses with no whitespace after the full stop interestingly, certain operating systems decided to treat this as a hyperlink with typical styling. remarkably, since .xxx is a valid TLD and {child's name} is a popular name, the link resolved to an active domain which forwards the user to a homonymous adult performer's Brazzers profile on a school app!
    - justnotworthit 6y ago
      happily, this story doesn't end with "and he's still a registered sex offender today!"
  - Brian_K_White 6y ago
    100 years ago when I went to create my first AOL account, a typical way to construct the username was first initial last name, "bwhite" in my case. It was not allowed, and it was not because it was taken, because I then tried a lot of names and generated denied messages for different types of denials like already occupied and invalid characters or length or swear words etc. They each had their own verbiage, and they were all different from the message for "bwhite". Also I think there was some pretty easy way to test for the existence of a username in the app like just trying to message them or something, so I knew the name was not in use. That must have been '95 or so, and nothing has much changed.
dvt 6y ago
More race-baiting garbage headlines by Gizmodo. The article itself even says that the term "redhead" is also banned. Clearly some (semi-)auto-generated list of porn terms. But of course let's lead with "blocks anything Asian!" to get them outrage clicks. A non-story that's being upvoted on HN for no other reason than having a provocative headline. I'm also getting spam-downvoted with no counter-arguments. This is classic clickbait, I'm not sure how anyone could possibly disagree.
- thereare5lights 6y ago
  > This is classic clickbait, I'm not sure how anyone could possibly disagree. Perhaps it is because this does not affect you or your family. I'm Asian American. If I turn on the adult filter on my children's device, they will be unable to search for anything Asian. Do you realize how much damage that would do if my children cannot even research things related to themselves? This is not clickbait. Just because you are not affected by it doesn't mean it's "race-baiting garbage".
  - filoleg 6y ago
    >Do you realize how much damage that would do if my children cannot even research things related to themselves? I think a more likely reason they won't be able to research things related to themselves is because the term "teen" is also banned by that filter (assuming they are around that age, of course, which could be a completely wrong guess on my end).
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > they will be unable to search for anything Asian They will be unable to search for things with "Asian" as a term. They will be able to find lots of Asian things and things related to more specific locations / names / ideas.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  Why are you assuming the only reason to downvote would be that they think the headline has no clickbait qualities?
- 6y ago
elil17 6y ago
It literally blocks "Asian restaurants near me." The fact that someone at Apple made a simple word based filter and didn't think of the possibility that words have different meanings in different contexts is absolutely astounding to me.
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  It's possible the wordfilter is provided by some outside service and it wasn't inspected thoroughly.
- lovecg 6y ago
  You’re assuming a lot about the implementation. In fact I strongly doubt that somebody at Apple literally put “asian” as a blanket filter. It’s more likely an opaque machine learning feature gone awry.
  - vsareto 6y ago
    You can get out of anything if you put machine learning in between the developers and customers
    - prophesi 6y ago
      And what's extra depressing is that they're usually not lying. For nontrivial AI, the developers can neither sufficiently answer why it does x or why it doesn't do y.
      - judge2020 6y ago
        They're working on it: https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/30/google-researchers-release-audit-framework-to-close-ai-accountability-gap/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/30/google-researchers-releas...
        scarmig 6y ago
        It's worth pointing out that, post-firing, the present tense doesn't really apply to Timnit Gebru...
edwnjos 6y ago
I guess apple has figured out the truth we all know deep down..
amelius 6y ago
It's quite baffling that you can't define your own content filter on your own device. Perhaps this will finally make some Apple users tired of being parented by Apple.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
serjester 6y ago
Personally I use content filters to block me from going on yahoo.com (don’t ask). As a byproduct it blocks a lot of other stuff - including this article. Too ironic.
- mytherin 6y ago
  I used to have it enabled to block certain social media websites. It is unfortunate you can't just block websites without also enabling the adult content filter, especially since the adult content filter has many false positives in my experience.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
diebeforei485 6y ago
Whoever owns the adult content feature should dogfood it, as should some folks adjacent teams.
- spoonjim 6y ago
  Apple is well-known as the whitest tech company in leadership roles, it’s entirely possible they did but never noticed.
  - samatman 6y ago
    The idea that Apple engineers, no matter how "white", never searched for Asian food in Cupertino, strains credibility to the breaking point.
    - ripdog 6y ago
      Why would you search for 'asian' food? You'd search for japanese, chinese, korean, vietnamese...
      - viraptor 6y ago
        Because there are many similarities and if you like 4 of the listed ones, searching for an Asian restaurant gives you more options to browse without searching for a specific thing.
        thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > Because there are many similarities This just isn't true.
        viraptor 6y ago
        What would you call all 4 featuring noodle dishes, curries over rice, ramen-like dishes, etc.? Sounds like a similarity to me.
neya 6y ago
> any search tangentially related to “Asian” (i.e., Asian-American, Asian food, Southeast Asian, Asian restaurants near me, etc) will return a message reading “You cannot browse this page at ‘google.com’ because it is restricted,” or, “The URL was blocked by a content filter.” > Other racial or ethnic search terms such as “Black,” “white,” “Korean,” “Arab” or “French” don’t seem to be impacted by the filter. How is this not racism against Asians? It's pathetic that a trillion dollar company's racist content filter would even pass through quality checks in the first place.
- filoleg 6y ago
  >How is this not racism against Asians? That same filter also blocks the word "redhead", among others.
  - type0 6y ago
    What conclusion could we make? Apple doesn't consider Asians and redheads important enough to fix this.
    - filoleg 6y ago
      I think a more charitable interpretation of the situation would be "Apple didn't expect the number of Adult Content Filter users to be high enough to dedicate more efforts to testing it before shipping. So they had no idea until now that there were issues like this in the first place." This situation has nothing to do with Asians or redheads not being "important enough". It has everything to do with the adult content filter feature not being "important enough" (until these news about the bug broke out, I assume).
- judge2020 6y ago
  Because there is no quality check. It's a bad implementation not being reviewed by a human - it's not racist, it's just banning stuff related to porn, and inconsistently at that.
  - 6y ago
dang 6y ago
Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26020424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26020424

I could have sworn I've seen a headline like this repeatedly over the years. Maybe its sporadic reoccurrence reveals that people don't really use the Adult Content Filter because this is such an obviously nonsensical thing to have, especially in the Bay Area, where these guys have their HQ. Like there are so many reasons you'd use the word Asian here.

astura 6y ago
Its called the Scunthorpe problem. The name comes from an early incident where AOL filters prevented users from Scunthorpe, England from creating accounts. (because of "cunt" in "Scunthorpe" if that wasn't obvious) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem Few years before the AOL incident I recall watching a news story about internet filters (in schools... I believe) blocking information on Superbowl 30, which is stylized with roman numerals, as Superbowl XXX. I remember this 25 years later because it was so amusing to me. Still is. (XXX is sometimes used to denote sexual content.) Oh, hey! Wikipedia actually provides a citation for the Superbowl XXX incident!!
- thereare5lights 6y ago
  It's close not but quite. That problem is describing terms where the issue is a substring of the term itself. Here, the issue is due to the gross sexual fetishization of Asians in western culture. That is, it's context based, not term based.
  - astura 6y ago
    No, it is the Scunthorpe problem. There's no rule the "banned" term has to be a substring, just the filter blocks it because in a different context it would violate the content policy. >The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. They go on to give examples such as a profanity filter blocking the word "bone" at a paleontology conference and a user banned for saying "great tits" when referring to the bird.
    - thereare5lights 6y ago
      No, it isn't. From the article > The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue. Specifically > because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning.
  - worker767424 6y ago
    > gross sexual fetishization of Asians in western culture No need to pass so much judgement.
    - thereare5lights 6y ago
      What?
      - justnotworthit 6y ago
        No need to pass so much judgement.
- 867-5309 6y ago
  sort of related - I recently had an incident with a school app where children can upload and showcase work, leave messages for parents, etc. a message was signed by a seven-year-old as "love from {child's name}.xxx" - three kisses with no whitespace after the full stop interestingly, certain operating systems decided to treat this as a hyperlink with typical styling. remarkably, since .xxx is a valid TLD and {child's name} is a popular name, the link resolved to an active domain which forwards the user to a homonymous adult performer's Brazzers profile on a school app!
  - justnotworthit 6y ago
    happily, this story doesn't end with "and he's still a registered sex offender today!"
- Brian_K_White 6y ago
  100 years ago when I went to create my first AOL account, a typical way to construct the username was first initial last name, "bwhite" in my case. It was not allowed, and it was not because it was taken, because I then tried a lot of names and generated denied messages for different types of denials like already occupied and invalid characters or length or swear words etc. They each had their own verbiage, and they were all different from the message for "bwhite". Also I think there was some pretty easy way to test for the existence of a username in the app like just trying to message them or something, so I knew the name was not in use. That must have been '95 or so, and nothing has much changed.

dvt 6y ago

More race-baiting garbage headlines by Gizmodo. The article itself even says that the term "redhead" is also banned. Clearly some (semi-)auto-generated list of porn terms. But of course let's lead with "blocks anything Asian!" to get them outrage clicks. A non-story that's being upvoted on HN for no other reason than having a provocative headline. I'm also getting spam-downvoted with no counter-arguments. This is classic clickbait, I'm not sure how anyone could possibly disagree.

thereare5lights 6y ago
> This is classic clickbait, I'm not sure how anyone could possibly disagree. Perhaps it is because this does not affect you or your family. I'm Asian American. If I turn on the adult filter on my children's device, they will be unable to search for anything Asian. Do you realize how much damage that would do if my children cannot even research things related to themselves? This is not clickbait. Just because you are not affected by it doesn't mean it's "race-baiting garbage".
- filoleg 6y ago
  >Do you realize how much damage that would do if my children cannot even research things related to themselves? I think a more likely reason they won't be able to research things related to themselves is because the term "teen" is also banned by that filter (assuming they are around that age, of course, which could be a completely wrong guess on my end).
- viraptor 6y ago
  > they will be unable to search for anything Asian They will be unable to search for things with "Asian" as a term. They will be able to find lots of Asian things and things related to more specific locations / names / ideas.
happytoexplain 6y ago
Why are you assuming the only reason to downvote would be that they think the headline has no clickbait qualities?
6y ago

elil17 6y ago

It literally blocks "Asian restaurants near me." The fact that someone at Apple made a simple word based filter and didn't think of the possibility that words have different meanings in different contexts is absolutely astounding to me.

BitwiseFool 6y ago
It's possible the wordfilter is provided by some outside service and it wasn't inspected thoroughly.
lovecg 6y ago
You’re assuming a lot about the implementation. In fact I strongly doubt that somebody at Apple literally put “asian” as a blanket filter. It’s more likely an opaque machine learning feature gone awry.
- vsareto 6y ago
  You can get out of anything if you put machine learning in between the developers and customers
  - prophesi 6y ago
    And what's extra depressing is that they're usually not lying. For nontrivial AI, the developers can neither sufficiently answer why it does x or why it doesn't do y.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      They're working on it: https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/30/google-researchers-release-audit-framework-to-close-ai-accountability-gap/ https://venturebeat.com/2020/01/30/google-researchers-releas...
      - scarmig 6y ago
        It's worth pointing out that, post-firing, the present tense doesn't really apply to Timnit Gebru...

edwnjos 6y ago

I guess apple has figured out the truth we all know deep down..

amelius 6y ago

It's quite baffling that you can't define your own content filter on your own device. Perhaps this will finally make some Apple users tired of being parented by Apple.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

serjester 6y ago

Personally I use content filters to block me from going on yahoo.com (don’t ask). As a byproduct it blocks a lot of other stuff - including this article. Too ironic.

mytherin 6y ago
I used to have it enabled to block certain social media websites. It is unfortunate you can't just block websites without also enabling the adult content filter, especially since the adult content filter has many false positives in my experience.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

diebeforei485 6y ago

Whoever owns the adult content feature should dogfood it, as should some folks adjacent teams.

spoonjim 6y ago
Apple is well-known as the whitest tech company in leadership roles, it’s entirely possible they did but never noticed.
- samatman 6y ago
  The idea that Apple engineers, no matter how "white", never searched for Asian food in Cupertino, strains credibility to the breaking point.
  - ripdog 6y ago
    Why would you search for 'asian' food? You'd search for japanese, chinese, korean, vietnamese...
    - viraptor 6y ago
      Because there are many similarities and if you like 4 of the listed ones, searching for an Asian restaurant gives you more options to browse without searching for a specific thing.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > Because there are many similarities This just isn't true.
        viraptor 6y ago
        What would you call all 4 featuring noodle dishes, curries over rice, ramen-like dishes, etc.? Sounds like a similarity to me.

neya 6y ago

> any search tangentially related to “Asian” (i.e., Asian-American, Asian food, Southeast Asian, Asian restaurants near me, etc) will return a message reading “You cannot browse this page at ‘google.com’ because it is restricted,” or, “The URL was blocked by a content filter.” > Other racial or ethnic search terms such as “Black,” “white,” “Korean,” “Arab” or “French” don’t seem to be impacted by the filter. How is this not racism against Asians? It's pathetic that a trillion dollar company's racist content filter would even pass through quality checks in the first place.

filoleg 6y ago
>How is this not racism against Asians? That same filter also blocks the word "redhead", among others.
- type0 6y ago
  What conclusion could we make? Apple doesn't consider Asians and redheads important enough to fix this.
  - filoleg 6y ago
    I think a more charitable interpretation of the situation would be "Apple didn't expect the number of Adult Content Filter users to be high enough to dedicate more efforts to testing it before shipping. So they had no idea until now that there were issues like this in the first place." This situation has nothing to do with Asians or redheads not being "important enough". It has everything to do with the adult content filter feature not being "important enough" (until these news about the bug broke out, I assume).
judge2020 6y ago
Because there is no quality check. It's a bad implementation not being reviewed by a human - it's not racist, it's just banning stuff related to porn, and inconsistently at that.
- 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26020424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26020424