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.