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I used to work on a system with a heavy amount of UGC (gaming network). We had a big team of people doing moderation of reported content, and the amount of stuf
by thehappypm 5y ago
I used to work on a system with a heavy amount of UGC (gaming network). We had a big team of people doing moderation of reported content, and the amount of stuff they had to deal with was monstrous. Lots of death threats, racism, evil images, SWAT-ing. They'd invite people to do ride-alongs to see the types of things that were reported, and it was brutal. A very tough job. A lot of those folks were ex-military, we needed really tough people.
They were kind of a weird org, the police of the network, and they kind of kept to themselves but carried a ton of weight. When they were looped into a meeting for a new feature -- for example, "Should we let users send videos to each other?" -- they'd list out the evil ways people would use them, and then list out the various CSAM scans we'd be obligated to do if we hosted the content on our servers. They didn't have the means to block features, but they did put a healthy fear-of-God into us, and made it so we didn't have a lot of big public debacles of kids seeing porn on the home screen of the device, or things like that.
I can imagine that Apple has a similar group. I can imagine they went to some executive, told them that this would be their best way to comply with the law, of course you don't need to access the images themselves, that would be a privacy violation and we don't do that! We just need the hashes, may we remind you this is CSAM we're talking about? Then it went up the chain and people were excited to "protect the kids" and protect the brand, hashes != user data, everyone wins!
I'm guessing this move was mostly misaligned priorities, and possibly some genuine incompetence or perhaps people not speaking up when they saw the potential here.
- belter 5y agoSo this group of good hardened souls...That from the description could exist at Apple...and went to speak to their management about all the good thinks they need to do. Do they also speak up to their management about all the activities Apple is complicit with, so as to keep their presence in the Chinese market?
- spicybright 5y agoI doubt it. If they did apple would just find "stronger" people.
- thehappypm 5y agoNo, because that’s not in their wheelhouse.
- mmcnl 5y agoI have no idea wat UGC is. Can you please not use abbreviations that serve no purpose other than confuse the reader?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jackson1442 5y agoUser generated content. It's a pretty standard term in the game dev community.
- toqy 5y agoIt's a standard term for the audience of this site, can you please not be so self important?
- kzrdude 5y agoNot for me, and my account is 10 years old. Just a single data point, though.
- pensatoio 5y agoNever heard of it. I doubt the gaming industry makes up a sizeable portion of HN.
- mmcnl 5y agoThere's no reason to obfuscate your message by using unnecessary abbreviations. What's wrong with avoiding ambiguous abbreviations and typing out "user generated content"? Letters on HN are free. Why be lazy when you can be clear and unambiguous?
- thehappypm 5y agoMy apologies, I hear it so much I just assume everyone on HN does too.
- joe_the_user 5y agoI used to work on a system with a heavy amount of UGC (gaming network) And here we have it, a situation where the content a user generates on what's ostensibly "their machine" is being treated more and more, by companies and the state as being equivalent to "UGC", user generate content - stuff explicitly being shared. Obviously, the insidious thing is that no one will be able to create anything without even the creation process falling under someone's "terms of use".
- thehappypm 5y agoIt’s a different ball game when the content is being shared on a network, I think.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]