Hi,<p>I am wondering what do you think of idea of creating service which would detect porn for web 2.0 services using humans brains (they would be employees of this service). You would point to image url using API and service after some time (let say 5 minutes) would answer requesting (GET/POST) website url given by you with answer (YES/NO). Service would charge 1 cent by one image uploaded.<p>What do you think of this idea?<p>Regards,
Wiktor
If you're going to offer a service like this, you want a few tiers of verification. You should have a lightning fast level 1 service that returns an automatic response. Perhaps level 2 would be a more computationally expensive automatic response. Level 3 might be human analysis, but the image would be just one of several shown on a screen at once. Level 4 would actually get a human's full attention for a few seconds. And Level 5 would be to handle strange cases, do CP reports and handle disputes.
Existing flagging systems are adequate and 1 cent per use doesn't seem like a sustainable business model for anyone involved. It seems like mostly social networks would be your customer, but 5 minutes is a long wait and eliminates many use cases. A quick script hooked up to Mechanical Turk (or TaskArmy) does the same thing and could provide results in a minute or less.<p>You'd also be associating yourself with porn, which comes with all sorts of weird consequences.<p>What makes you think that this is a problem that needs solving? And if it needs solving, what makes it worth it to you? Are you uniquely qualified to solve this problem? What is your end goal?
Five minutes is a long time for said web services to have to wait for an image to be validated.<p>Also, you might (i don't know, ianal) have some legal issues when inevitably the child porn shows up, because then your employees are being paid to look at child porn. Which if they're not cops might be a problem.<p>Although, if i'm running a web service, better you than my own mods, I guess.
So long as you have clear definitions for what is or isn't porn, and you have some protections and easy reporting mechanisms for images of child sexual abuse (as smartwater says, that's going to be a tricky legal area.)<p>But how much are you going to pay the people looking at the images?
The other comments seem to suggest that this is unworkable, but services like this already exist:<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/technology/19screen.html</a>