> It seems nice but every single time I see service allowing anonymous uploads like such I’m thinking immediately: criminal use.
This seems like the Hollywood movie plot criminal use.
Actual criminals just put a normal server/proxy in a non-extradition country or compromise any of the zillion unpatched Wordpress instances on the internet or something equally boring.
Might I say that this whole safetyist moral panic is very convenient for large corporations? If you can't host your own service due to these concerns, you'll use the cloud :)
It's not a moral panic it's called "an extended engagement with law enforcement will be unpleasant and costly" and you probably don't want that.
And if you're wondering why it's that way, then casually observe everytime people declare that people under arrest or being tried "don't deserve..." something.
The problem here is that we keep acting like the way we should solve this is by having people making toy projects or general purpose tools cower in fear of their own government and stop trying to make anything, instead of establishing a government that can distinguish between violent drug cartels and child abusers vs. innocent behavior or minor offenses and then not inflict senseless damage on the latter.
Government is incentivized and rewarded for finding and punishing violent drug cartels and child abusers. When those become hard to find, the government punishes minor offenses, since it is easy to paint these as hardened criminals, and nobody is in a real position to discover or publicize the actual state of things.
It's more along the lines of, people hear "money laundering" and think this implies some kind of drug ring or terrorism, when it's really some laws so expansive and nebulous that ordinary people frequently do it without knowing, so now there are laws on the books that allow random normies to be charged with a felony at the discretion of the prosecutor.
And these laws tend to take a very specific form: They're laws against things adjacent to other crimes, instead of laws against the original crimes themselves. So this is like, the CFAA putting felony penalties on "unauthorized access" when the implication justifying the penalty is "unauthorized access in order to commit a crime like credit card fraud" and the solution is to put those penalties on the actual fraud. Or "money laundering" which implies an underlying crime to be laundering the proceeds of which implies that it's redundant and they should instead be charged with the underlying crime.
Because what those laws erroneously allow is for someone to be charged with the secondary offense without ever establishing the primary one, or substituting a minor primary offense even though the penalties for the secondary offense were set under the assumption it was a major one. Which is how ordinary people get ensnared.
But we don't need those laws at all because you can charge the actual criminals with their actual crimes, so they should just be repealed, or converted into minor misdemeanors with the heavy penalties instead being imposed on the associated serious crime and only when it actually exists.
Some “adjacent” crimes like that exist because enforcement and/or detection of the original crime is hard and/or expensive. Like gun laws. Or curfew.
I still think that the real problem is the incentives of government; the problem you describe exist simply because government also has the power to create new laws in order to make life easier for itself, at the expense of the governed. I.e. the problem is government prioritizing being seen as useful over actually being useful.
> Some “adjacent” crimes like that exist because enforcement and/or detection of the original crime is hard and/or expensive. Like gun laws. Or curfew.
So we have to do the hard and/or expensive thing instead. It's the government, they spend six trillion dollars a year, "not expensive" is clearly not a thing we're currently receiving as a benefit of the status quo.
In general these laws will be making things more expensive, because investigations, prosecutions and incarceration of people convicted of adjacent crimes but not primary crimes all cost a ton of money for negligible if not overtly negative outcomes. When you throw minor offenders in prison you have to pay to prosecute and incarcerate them and lose the benefits of their contributions to society if they hadn't been incarcerated. It's just setting money on fire, except that in this case (as in many other cases) "money" is really "lives".
> I still think that the real problem is the incentives of government; the problem you describe exist simply because government also has the power to create new laws in order to make life easier for itself, at the expense of the governed. I.e. the problem is government prioritizing being seen as useful over actually being useful.
This isn't really a different problem, it's just asking the question in the form of, given that these laws are stupid how do we bring about a system that doesn't have them and can't pass them anymore?
It's even more boring: When I share criminal data (usually old movies that are still in copyright), I just put them in an encrypted 7zip archive and upload to google drive, then delete after my friend downloads it.
I mean, in this case we're talking about emoji, so I'm having a hard time picturing the criminal use, but in general anonymous file uploads or text uploads absolutely get used by criminals as soon as they're discovered. Anyone who's run a service for long enough will have stories of the fight against spam and CSAM (I do!).
> I mean, in this case we're talking about emoji, so I'm having a hard time picturing the criminal use, but in general anonymous file uploads or text uploads absolutely get used by criminals as soon as they're discovered
You can use the emoji service as an anonymous data upload service because it transfers information and you can encode arbitrary data into other data. But that sounds like work and people are lazy and criminals are people so they'll generally do the lazy thing and use one of the numerous other options available to them which are less work than creating and distributing an emoji encoder.
If you make a generic file upload service, well, they don't have to do as much work to use that. Then the question is, what should we do about that?
The next question is, does preventing them from using a given service meaningfully prevent any crime? That one we know the answer to. No, it does not. Because they still have all of the other alternatives, like putting it on a server or service in a foreign country or compromising random Wordpress instances etc.
Then we can ask, from the perspective of what the law should be and the perspective of a host under a given set of laws, what should we do? And these are related questions, because you want to consider how people are going to respond to a given set of laws.
So, what happens if you impose strict liability on hosts regardless of whether they know that a given thing is crime? Well then you don't have any services hosting data for people because nobody has a 0% false negative rate but without one you're going to jail.
What if you only impose liability if they know about it? Then knowing is a liability because you still can't have a 0% false negative rate, so they're going to prevent knowing and you end up with Mega encrypting user data so they can't themselves see it. That seems pretty dumb, you'd like them to be able to remove obvious bad stuff without putting liability on them if they're not 100% perfect.
What if you only impose liability if someone else reports it? This works like the DMCA takedown process, and then you get a combination of the first two. They can allow uploads but they can also remove things they're aware of and want to remove, but they end up de facto required to remove anything anyone reports, because if they don't and they ever get it wrong then they're screwed. So then you get widespread takedown abuse and have created a trolling mechanism. This is not a great option.
What if you let them moderate without any liability but require a court order to force them to take something down? This is like the approach taken by the CDA and is the best option, because you're not forcing risk-averse corporate bureaucrats to comply with evidence-free fraudulent takedowns but you still allow them to remove obvious spam etc. without liability. This leaves the service with a good set of incentives, because in general they'll want to satisfy users, so they'll try to remove spam etc. but not remove non-spam. Meanwhile this still leaves the option for crimes to be investigated by the people who are actually supposed to be investigating crimes, i.e. law enforcement, and then the courts can still order things to be taken down -- and more than that, put the actual criminals in jail -- without putting penalties on the service for not themselves being infallible adjudicators of what is and isn't crime.
This seems like the Hollywood movie plot criminal use.
Actual criminals just put a normal server/proxy in a non-extradition country or compromise any of the zillion unpatched Wordpress instances on the internet or something equally boring.