Update to the dicsussing issues with adult content for web businesses

We can see a number of cases demonstrating that there are many issues with delivering adult content in the Web. From latest, I would like to highlight following two:

New Microsoft search engine Bing.com is perfect if you want to see the porn multimedia: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/01/bing_hits_uk/

The ISP Triple Fibre Network has been closed by FTC for multiple violations, including spam and child porn http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/06/3fn.shtm .

Regarding last article: if you have the host at some hosting provider or ISP, are you sure you are safe? ISP can be closed at any time, and all your resources will be unaccessible.

Picollator and the big competition: Update

Due to the number of announces about new start-ups offering ‘image search’ or ‘automatic image tagging’, ‘new opportunities for customers’ and ‘new approach to web search’, a user is hesitating what to choose. I would like to provide the list of simple questions, which the user should ask evaluating new offers.

Q1: Does it (the announced service) have the online demo?
No=0, Yes=1

Q2: Does it allow to put a user’s query to try?
No=0, Yes=1

Q3: Does it allow to submit user’s picture to search?
No=0, Yes=1

Q4: Does it work with grey-scale images and good artworks?
No=0, Yes=1

Q5: Does it allow to submit picture and text together to search?
No=0, Yes=1

Q6: Does it search for similar objects rather than identical?
No=0, Yes=1

Now please calculate the Sum from all answers. If you obtain Sum=6, pay attention on this new service.

Comment on ‘Walking the Cyberbeat’ by Newsweek

Newsweek has published an interesting article ‘Walking the Cyberbeat’ about fighting against the adult and other unwanted content at Facebook and its biggest competitor MySpace. The article is very fresh and its reflects main issues with content moderation at social networks. However, one important thing attracted my attention. Nick Summers, an author of that article, made an example on the typical work of the content moderator at Facebook. The example contains following phrase:

After delivering a verdict on 75 of the 438,848 outstanding photos flagged by Facebook users… …Axten is off to a meeting. It’s just another day at the office of the world’s fastest-growing social-networking site.

And another one:

The 26-year-old Stanford grad is one of some 150 people the young company employs to keep the site clean—out of a total head count of 850.

In my words, it means following from the point of view of CEO, COO, CFO and CMO:

1. 150 people are paid regularly for doing the manual work and Facebook pays all taxes, social insurance, operational expenses and overheads for the team of 150 people.
2. No doubts, 150 people can do much more for Facebook than doing that very monotonous work
3. 150 of 850 people are in content moderation, which means that more than 17% of the whole team is making this strange manual work.
4. Those 150 people can moderate 150*75=11,250 images of  more than 400,000 outstanding images, which is less than 3% of daily demands. If you know ISO9001, it is 3x times less than 10%
5. The results of their work are far from what is good, because of the performance and because they process images which flagged by Facebook users. How many other images among billions at Faceboook are not flagged?

I am not criticising Facebook. Same issues exist in all other companies running public web services, including MySpace. It reminds the history of the industrial progress: in 18 century most of the work has been done by people. Then machines arise. It is very strange that managers in IT still think in terms of 18 century.

So I would recommend a simple thing for them: just count everything and finally think that maybe it is better to use piFilter as the automatic detection tool, which covers 100% and does not need social taxes, overheads and operational expenses.

Adult image detection service piFilter is ready

You may plug-and-play with our new porn detection service www.pifilter.com . As I reported before, porn and adult content in images can be one of the big issues for online media, ISPs and search engines because it cannot be detected automatically. Now the time is changing, and we installed the online service which you can easily use.

pifilter website capture

If you have a social network, online albums, file sharing or provide ISP, you may set up your system to query our engine on each image being viewed or uploaded in your service. piFilter provides the simple API to send the query and receive the response in the form like ‘porn’, ‘no porn’ and ’suspicious’. It does not filter out images – it works much better offering the user the opportunity to manage the situation by himself. 

The technology is a part of our strategic development with www.picollator.com, so make sure that we implemented best pattern recognition algorithms to analyze images by piFilter. The service does not analyse text (maybe, yet!), it recognizes image content itself, so it is 100% language-independent and can work at English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, German, Korean, Estonian – at any website.  piFilter does not care about the language, because it sees the image, not reads the texts.  Such advantage is one of the key feature for most of social networks, blogs and ISPs, where there are many pageviews or uploads with no associated text content. The quality of the detection is above 80% and piFilter can process all image sizes and types in the Internet.

piFilter works by the analogy with 99% of manual content moderators, but performs much faster and does not need overheads, administration and operational expenses, and it is much cheaper in terms of direct costs. The commercial model reminds best cases of SaaS – you pay only for usage, not for time! So you subscribe to the particular traffic in number of requests, and may spend this traffic as long as you want. Something like pre-paid cellular tariffs, isn’t it? piFilter tariffs are made so any small or average site owner benefits up to 10x times subsribing to piFilter. Especially if calculate all direct or indirect expenses on content moderation or legal issues.

It is the unique market offer, so try it and be flexible and safe.

Can adult content become the problem. Part 2.

Since I have posted the previous post, I got some public and private responses, and had some conversations with people involved into the web business. Therefore I decided to post another comment to cover some issues.

The problem addressed looks unusual just from the very first look. Probably, you did not experienced problems with adult content before or just did not take into into consideration. However, if you consider all agruments, including direct and indirect costs of managing the content,  legal spendings, the potential risks of being under some lawsuits and the corresponding losses, then the issue become more serious.

The case described in my first post has more relations to the websites. However, I am sure that many ISPs may suffer from customers claims to stop porn. Porn can be textual and visual, not necessary both. In many cases ISPs receive addresses of porn sites from 3rd parties, but is it good enough? Can such addresses like facebook.com, or myspace.com, or msn.com be in the black list? Never. Because it is not right to put them in the blacklist. Because they are really good services and many people want them working. And they are really big… Really big, and containing everything. Including what you or your children should not see. So how ISP can deal with public services not in the blacklist? There is the only way out: using independent software for estimating porn in multimedia, because it is language independent and pure approach. None of text-based filters can protect ISP subscriber from non-textual resources. BTW, we are ready to provide the complex solution: image-based filter and semantic text-based filter in one box. The semantic text filter will not ban Wikipedia for very much artificial case, it will understand the meaning. The image filter will not allow anonimous images with porn to be transferred via your network. So this is the case for ISPs as well.

OK, you may say that the porn is one of the biggest businesses in the World. Some (or many?) of your clients want to see the adult content. No problem, it is your business, so your software may decide what to do with the estimations obtained from the Recogmission filter. Remember: we do not block the content. Instead, we just generate the ratio of porn potential in each image for your convenience.

Thus, for each estimation by pur filter, your software may

• block porn images
• send the alerts to the few content managers to deal with it
• customize the content delivery to the particular groups of customers – maybe some them wants to see porn only

I belive that each person above 18 has own rights either to recieve adult content, or do not receive it. Your duty for him is to ensure that his rights are satisfied. For your business it means that most of people will like it, because it is flexible, efficient and right-protective at the same time.

Remember: if we can not see the problem, it does not mean that the problem is absent. It might hurt you when you never estimate.  So just ask us about the visual filter service.

Can visual adult content become the problem for your business and how to manage it?

Adult content, especially images, can be a real problem for any public business like social networks, blogs, online photo albums, ISPs, mobile networks, etc. It could be the problem for corporate processes as well…

Everybody knows about last scandals with adult content in public web services:

• China government is blocking big search engines Google and Baidu for displaying porn in the search results http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/07/googlechina_baidu_sina_apologize_for_pr0n_links/,
• Wikipedia has been ‘arrested’ by Internet Watch Foundation because of posting the album cover photo with the topless young lady,
• Australian government attemps to build the big wall against the adult content
• Nokia is to close very popular Mosh  because of too much porn there http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/20/nokia_mosh_fail/
• MySpace has to admit it found 90,000 registered sex offenders during last two years, etc…

Of course, the discussion about the porn and related things is very old. No doubts, some people love porn, erotics, etc. I think they have rights to love it. However, the big issue is that if you have the public web site, you can have many different users, and some of them do not want to see adult pictures. Some of them are under 18, some others are religious guys, others can be parents, and so on. Of course you post legal statements and service agreement about that ‘you have to be 18′, ‘porn content is not allowed’, etc. I am sorry – who among web users read legal rules carefully before registering in the social network? Maybe some of them…

It would not be the big problem, but consider following case. A person who just wants to demonstrate something unusual made posts with adult images into your social network, online photo album or blog. Another person, who is under 18 has found those pictures. Fortunately for his menthal health – but unfortunately for your business! – his parents discovered this case. Maybe they would just tell him that it is no good… Then you are lucky, indeed. However, they can claim to the court that you propagate adult content. Look, lets pray if that it is not the child sexual abuse case! Such claims can destroy your business or at least make your life harder.

You say: “OK, I know about all of that. I am moderating my content and I am using text filter.” My congratulations, because you are clever. However, in most cases user-generated adult content is not described in typical words. Text filters fail distinguishing ‘porn’ vs ‘against porn’, so I will not be surprised if this posting will be banned by some text filters. Also, consider your expenses for the content moderation. If you have the average website with 10,000 image uploads daily, then you have to use at least 12 content managers to browse all of that. 12 people needs to be paid weekly or monthly. You can calculate the costs by yourself. You say: “we do not moderate all content items. Just some of them”. You may say: “We ask users to report about such cases”. Ask users, of course… Do not moderate all content items (BTW, you do the part of work because you cannot afford doing the whole work!). It is your choice. You can estimate your direct and indirect expenses anyway, and you will stay under the permanent stress because of the high probability that your guys missed one damned image with something which is legally improper.

So what I propose: we have developed the visual content filter, which can estimate the porn in images. You can connect your service to that engine via our API, send request on each image and obtain our estimation: ‘porn’, ‘neutral’, or ’suspicious’. Then your service may decide itself what to do with that image.  The filter is based on some of pattern recognition achievements we developed for Picollator.com . For instance, it can detect nude human bodies, some elements of it in different positions and recognize the porn in 75% of all cases. The engine can be hosted at our servers, or – if you have some particular demands – can be licensed for deployment in your environment. The solutions works for everybody: social network, online photo, blog, ISP, corporate network, etc. If you wants us to made all work, we can integrate the filter into your service with a pleasure. It will cut your cost, improve your brand and let you be more relaxing at least somehow.

Be sure – it is much (!) cheaper, than spending your cash for the whole crowd of  moderators, your time on management and your health on lawyers You may read the additional info about the filter and contact us.