Two standards

Take the case of a father who took pictures of his son’s penis to send to a doctor in order to get antibiotics for an infection. Given how hard it is to apparently see a doctor face-to-face in some places, this makes sense, even if it’s a bit odd.

Google banned the guy when it automatically detected the image in his photos. The results were catastrophic because his home internet was tied to Google, almost every other account was tied to his Google email, years of pictures evaporated.(full story from the NYT)

This is all because the powers that be want to regulate the internet algorithmically and enforce this with zero human oversight.

Compare this to Pornhub. The company continually profits off of people’s misery. Images are constantly uploaded without the consent of those pictured, whether it be angry exes, blackmail or hacked pictures. Pornhub profits off of this and makes it nearly impossible for the victims to get the images taken down. It’s a long read, but I recommend this piece in the New Yorker: The Fight to Hold Pornhub Accountable.

One company callously treats parents as guilty and refuses to back down even after the parents were exonerated by the police. The other company has a clavier attitude to profiting off of the victims of crime.

The high-level solution is simple: internet businesses need to be held to the same standards as physical businesses. Google — plus Apple, Microsoft and the like, have become utilities. In the same way that an electric company can’t capriciously cut off service, account termination requires legal safeguards.

Likewise, Playboy or other traditional publishers of porn would be shut down and sued into oblivion if they repeatedly published pictures without the consent of those in the pictures. In practice this means that if Pornhub wants to make any money in the West, they need a much more rigorous verification and uploading process. This would be expensive, but that’s the cost of doing business. If you can’t turn a profit without breaking the law, then just maybe you don’t have a real business model.