>There are just legal requirements around certain types of porn for example. Or videos of illegal activities up to and sometimes even including murder.
If I understand your point, it is law enforcement doesn't allow moderation of these items outside of a certain environment? If so, can you suggest further reading of the laws for this area? I have never heard of them.
My point is not that law enforcement won't allow moderation outside certain environments. It's that law enforcement specifically forbids possession of, or even access to, these materials by anyone. FB likely has some kind of working agreement with law enforcement which allows them to do the business of moderating and reporting. Does that agreement extend to allowing FB contractors to access child porn from home? I'm in no position to say since I'm not privy to the details of the arrangement.
I'm saying as a contractor, as the low man on the totem pole, there is no way I would want any of that content touching my home network without an iron-clad assurance from every level of law enforcement that I would not be prosecuted. An assurance from your local prosecutor probably means nothing to the guys at the US Attorney's office. (And sometimes even vice-versa.) Accessing those materials in a secure environment that is audited and recorded, in direct partnership with every level of law enforcement, avoids issues of that content touching your router altogether.
I can't imagine that any person who understands criminal liability would actually want to do this kind of work from their own home networks.
I'm not sure exactly how this works in tech. I know lawyers who have worked on child abuse cases and they had tight restrictions on the evidence. Only the trial lawyers could request access. No paralegals, no sectaries, no copies. Only select Lawyers, the jury and the judge could view the evidence, and it was all controlled by the Justice Department. (I knew a lawyer who refused to look at the evidence, only the descriptions, because he didn't think he could handle defending him otherwise. He did successfully defend him though).
I suspect for Microsoft, they have some preliminary hashing algos that automatically send known media to a particular people with the same Justice Dept exceptions and controls for chain of custody. Other people may see content of course, but it would likely get flagged and shipped to people who were authorized to deal with it. You don't want a lot of people on that list obviously, but when it's just a few people, they get a constant stream of nightmare fuel.
I imagine they don't even want the fingerprints "getting out". Imagine if you had the fingerprints and the algorithm. This can't possibly be a cryptographic hash (too fragile); it's got to be possible to find "collisions" that have no relationship to the original image, and probably don't even look like images of anything at all.
Imagine the chaos someone could cause.
It'd be like back in 2010ish when somebody encoded a bunch of malware into bitcoin transactions: every bitcoin node running any kind of antivirus software was immediately kicked offline. Many AV programs deleted their owners' copy of bitcoind. It was madness. Forced the bitcoin developers to store the blockchain on-disk xored with a different random number unique to each computer.
I think it is simpler than that even. Imagine the scandal if some content moderator working from home copied over and saved child porn he found during moderation, and perhaps even redistributed it. Doesn’t even have to be child porn - could just be e.g. sexting messages between adults.
If I understand your point, it is law enforcement doesn't allow moderation of these items outside of a certain environment? If so, can you suggest further reading of the laws for this area? I have never heard of them.