September 2020 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

CEIPI AI & IP Training
by GC F Sept. 14, 2020

Sept. 14, 2020

Cari tutti, Volevo ricordarvi che il "CEIPI Advanced Training on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property" si svolgerà interamente online quest'anno dall'1 al 3 ottobre. Tutte le informazioni relative al corso e il programma delle lezioni sono disponibili alla pagina web riportata sotto: http://www.ceipi.edu/en/training-seminars/artificial-intelligence-and-intel… Le iscrizioni sono aperte fino alla fine di settembre. Vi prego di condividere l'annuncio e contattatemi nel caso vogliate informazioni ulteriori. A presto, Giancarlo

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AI for Good Global Summit
by Antonio Iacono Sept. 14, 2020

Sept. 14, 2020

https://aiforgood.itu.int/programme-2020/ Mi auguro che non vengano presentati progetti simili a quelli descritti qui [1]. "... The last thing society needs is for engineers in enclaves like Silicon Valley to deploy AI tools for global problems they know little about." [1] https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-ai-for-good-is-often-bad/

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Essere assunti da un algoritmo
by Diego Giorio Sept. 14, 2020

Sept. 14, 2020

Personalmente sono contento di avere già un lavoro. Ma non è il colloquio via WEB a infastidirmi, conosco persone che già anni fa avevano trovato lavoro in USA, in Australia, in Canada via Skype, con piena e reciproca soddisfazione. Quello che mi piace meno è l'algoritmo di partenza, del quale non si conosce la struttura, e che quindi giudica secondo parametri sconosciuti. Vero è che anche l'essere umano ha una sua propria scala di valori e quindi può scartarci, in modo più o meno consapevole, perchè non gli piace un tatuaggio o perchè c'è qualcosa nel nostro modo di fare, di parlare, di porsi, che lo irrita, senz ache noi possiamo saperlo. Buona domenica a tutti D. https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/per-esselunga-primo-job-day-massa-interamen… [https://i2.res.24o.it/images2010/2020/09/ADGFnzn/images/049dea0e-f268-11ea-…]<https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/per-esselunga-primo-job-day-massa-interamen…> Per Esselunga primo job day di massa interamente virtuale - Il Sole 24 ORE<https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/per-esselunga-primo-job-day-massa-interamen…> recruiting. Per Esselunga primo job day di massa interamente virtuale Nella catena di supermercati un algoritmo creerà il ranking iniziale delle 5mila candidature, ma poi tutto il percorso di ... www.ilsole24ore.com

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Re: [nexa] Ci sono ancora hacker tra i giovani d'oggi?
by Giuseppe Attardi Sept. 14, 2020

Sept. 14, 2020

All’MIT, dove è nata la hacker culture (e dove mi ci sono trovato immerso tra il 1978-81) il termine hack si riferiva a una soluzione astuta/spiritosa ma macchinosa/futile a un problema. Per esempio soluzioni provvisorie a un bug, senza andare alla sua fonte, erano chiamate “hack”. Un hack era per esempio l’uso della combinazione di tasti sulla Lisp Machine Escape-E, che … chiamava l’ascensore al piano in cui ti trovavi. — Beppe > On 13 Sep 2020, at 15:16, nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it wrote: > > Hack: > What hackers do. An experiment. An original solution to a problem. > ```

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Resignation letter from Facebook engineer
by Antonio Iacono Sept. 14, 2020

Sept. 14, 2020

https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/resignation-letter-from-facebook-eng… After nearly 5 1/2 years, today is my last day at Facebook. I'm quitting because I can no longer stomach contributing to an organization that is profiting off hate in the US and globally ... Every day "the looting starts, the shooting starts" stays up is a day that we choose to minimize regulatory risk at the expense of the safety of Black, Indigenous, and people of color.Violent hate groups and far-right militias are out there, and they’re using Facebook to recruit and radicalize people who will go on to commit violent hate crimes. So where’s the metric about this? ... I do assume –as required by policy –best intent of all my coworkers including leadership. It’s just, I can’t point to facts that substantiate that assumption when looking at our repeated failures to confront the hate and violence occuring and being organized on platform.

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81° Nexa Lunch Seminar | 23 Settembre 2020 | Modalità Telematica
by Nexa Media Sept. 14, 2020

Sept. 14, 2020

Gentilissimi, vi segnaliamo che l'81° Nexa Lunch Seminar, *"From equality to equity: an interdisciplinary perspective on mitigating algorithmic unfairness in ranking systems"*, con ospite *Elena Beretta* (Centro Nexa), si svolgerà *mercoledì 23 settembre, dalle ore 13.00 alle ore 14.00*, in *modalità telematica*, utilizzando il software open source di conference call *Jitsi Meet*. Per chi vorrà partecipare live al seminario sarà possibile accedere alla conference call attraverso il seguente link: https://meet.nexacenter.org/LunchSeminar Nexa Center for Internet and Society Newsletter Se non visualizzi correttamente questo messaggio clicca qui <https://nexa.polito.it/lunch-81> NEXA 81° Nexa Lunch Seminar Mercoledì 23 settembre 2020, ore 13.00 - 14.00 Politecnico di Torino https://nexa.polito.it/lunch-81 From equality to equity: an interdisciplinary perspective on mitigating algorithmic unfairness in ranking systems Speaker Elena Beretta (Centro Nexa) This event will be webcast live: https://nexa.polito.it/nexa-hangout-on-air L'INCONTRO SI SVOLGERÀ IN MODALITÀ TELEMATICA UTILIZZANDO IL SOFTWARE DI CONFERENCE CALL *JITSI MEET*. Per partecipare all'incontro: https://meet.nexacenter.org/LunchSeminar Nell'ultimo decennio abbiamo assistito a una cospicua diffusione di modelli predittivi per il processo decisionale progressivamente più sofisticati, che sfruttano una quantità sempre maggiore di *dati personali* suggerendo come i dati stessi debbano essere interpretati e quali azioni debbano essere perseguite. Le *decisioni algoritmiche* sono il risultato dei massicci e sempre più potenti *meccanismi di profilazione e classificazione* utilizzati nell'*apprendimento automatico*, che si sta gradatamente e pervasivamente diffondendo nelle nostre vite. In molti campi in cui questi sistemi sono stati applicati i progressi sono stati significativi. Tuttavia, una quantità rilevante di studi dimostra che, come gli esseri umani, gli *algoritmi* sono *suscettibili di pregiudizi*. A questo proposito, negli ultimi anni, ricercatori e professionisti hanno portato alla luce una serie di problematiche legate ai *risultati discriminatori di alcuni processi decisionali automatizzati*, in particolare nei confronti dei gruppi svantaggiati. Conseguentemente, le comunità di ricerca stanno dedicando considerevoli sforzi per studiare come includere il concetto di equità negli algoritmi di apprendimento automatico al fine di produrre risultati più equi ed evitare risultati discriminatori. Le attuali ricerche formalizzano il concetto di equità tramite diversi approcci, mostrando così una vasta e diversificata gamma di soluzioni sviluppate per essere applicate in contesti specifici. Nonostante tali soluzioni siano nate per regolare lo sviluppo, la diffusione e la governance responsabile dei sistemi di apprendimento automatico, la *ricerca sull'equità algoritmica* è in realtà parte di un più ampio dibattito su come queste tecnologie incorporino implicitamente alcune visioni politiche, economiche o culturali. Nonostante diversi sforzi siano stati compiuti in questa direzione, le questioni aperte sono ancora molte, in particolar modo per il fatto che la ricerca in questo campo si è spesso concentrata sul fornire una definizione di equità, piuttosto che cercare delle soluzioni alla disuguaglianza di fondo. Durante il corso del seminario verrà illustrato come strumenti e metodi dell'*informatica* e delle *scienze sociali* possano essere combinati *per definire, misurare e mitigare tale iniquità algoritmica*. In particolare, verrà illustrato *AFteRS*, un *sistema di ranking automatizzato equo-distributivo* per la giustizia sociale nel campo dei sistemi automatici, che affonda le sue radici nelle teorie filosofico distributive e in quelle economiche di uguaglianza delle opportunità. BIOGRAFIE - e informazioni supplementari [Beretta] *Elena BERETTA* received the M.Sc. in Economics and Statistics from University of Turin in September 2016 by working on an experimental thesis investigating the diffusion of innovation by agent-based models. She earned a second level Master degree in Data Science for Complex Economic Systems at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Moncalieri (TO), in June 2017. From April 2017 to September 2017 she got involved in an internship at DESPINA - Laboratory on Big Data Analytics at the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University Study of Turin – working on the NoVELOG project ("New Cooperative Business Models and Guidance for Sustainable City Logistics"). In November 2017 she’s starting to collaborate as PhD student, and effective member, with the Nexa Center for Internet & Society at Politecnico of Turin and with the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento), by working on a project on Data and Algorithms Ethics. Her current research focuses on improving the impact of automatic decision-making systems on society through the implementation of models involving data on human behavior. Specific fields of interest include data science, machine learning, recommendation systems and computational social sciences. *Letture consigliate e link utili:* * Barocas, S., Hardt, M., Narayanan, A. (2018). /Fairness and Machine Learning. http://www.fairmlbook.org <https://fairmlbook.org/>/ * /Benjamin, R. (2019). /Assessing risk, automating racism./ Science, 366(6464), 421–422. * Gummadi, K. P., Heidari, H. (2019). /Economic Theories of Distributive Justice for Fair Machine Learning. In Companion Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference,/ WWW ’19, pp. 1301–1302. ACM. * Roemer, J. E., Trannoy, A. (2015). /Equality of opportunity. Handbook of Income Distribution,/ 2(2), 217–300. * Singh, A., Joachims, T. (2018). /Fairness of exposure in rankings. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining,/ KDD’18, p. 2219–2228, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery. / // // Che cosa sono il Centro Nexa e i cicli di incontri “Mercoledì di Nexa” e “Nexa Lunch Seminar” <https://www.facebook.com/nexa.center/> <https://twitter.com/nexacenter> <https://www.youtube.com/user/NexaCenter> #nexalunchseminar <https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nexalunchseminar&src=typd> #elenaberetta <https://twitter.com/ElenaBeretta4> Il Centro Nexa su Internet & Società del Politecnico di Torino (Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica) dal 2006 è un centro di ricerca indipendente e interdisciplinare che, in collaborazione con l'Università di Torino, studia Internet (e più in generale le Tecnologie digitali) e i suoi rapporti con la società. Maggiori informazioni all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/about. Durante i “*Mercoledì di Nexa*”, che si tengono *ogni 2° mercoledì del mese* alle *ore 18 in punto*, il Centro Nexa su Internet e Società apre le sue porte non solo agli esperti e a tutti coloro i quali lavorano con Internet, ma anche a semplici appassionati e cittadini. Il ciclo di incontri intende approfondire, con un linguaggio preciso ma accessibile, i temi legati alla Rete: motori di ricerca, Creative Commons, social networks, open source/software libero, neutralità della rete, libertà di espressione, privacy, file sharing, big e open data, smart cities e molto altro. Al centro di quasi tutti gli incontri un ospite pronto a dialogare con i direttori del Centro Nexa, il Prof. Juan Carlos De Martin del Politecnico di Torino e il Prof. Marco Ricolfi dell'Università di Torino, nonché lo staff e i Fellows del Centro Nexa. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa, incluso un elenco di tutti i “Mercoledì” passati, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/mercoledi. Si segnala inoltre che dal maggio 2012 *ogni 4° mercoledì* del mese *dalle ore 13 alle ore 14* il Centro Nexa organizza anche i "*Nexa Lunch Seminar*". Una lista di tutti i “Lunch Seminar” passati è disponibile all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/lunch-seminars. See our events calendar <http://nexa.polito.it/events> if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, and conferences not listed in this email. Our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted. Responsabile Comunicazione Centro Nexa su Internet & Società: *Anita Botta*, tel: +39 011 090 7219, Mob: +39 347 131 3903, anita.botta(a)polito.it <mailto:anita.botta@polito.it>. Maggiori informazioni sui Mercoledì di Nexa e i Nexa Lunch Seminar, sono disponibili all'indirizzo: http://nexa.polito.it/events. Weekly Events Newsletter. Sign up <http://nexa.polito.it/mailing-lists> to receive this newsletter if this email was forwarded to you. To manage your subscription preferences, please click here <https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa>. Connect & get involved: Jobs, internships, and more <http://nexa.polito.it/get-involved>. Cordiali saluti,   -- Anita Botta Communication Manager Nexa Center for Internet & Society Politecnico di Torino – DAUIN Corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24 - 10129 Torino _web:_ https://nexa.polito.it/ _mail:_anita.botta@polito.it <mailto:anita.botta@polito.it> tel: 011 090 7219

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A QUIC Look at Web Tracking
by Giacomo Tesio Sept. 14, 2020

Sept. 14, 2020

QUIC has been developed by Google to improve the transport performance of HTTPS traffic. It currently accounts for approx. 7% of the global Internet traffic. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of user tracking via QUIC from the perspective of an online service. Our analysis reveals that the protocol design contains violations of privacy best practices through which a tracker can passively and uniquely identify clients across several connections. This tracking mechanisms can achieve reduced delays and band-width requirements compared to conventional browserfinger printing or HTTP cookies. This allows them to be applied in resource- or time-constrained scenarios such as real-time biddings in online advertising. To validate this finding, we investigated browsers which enable QUIC by default, e.g., Google Chrome. Our results suggest that the analyzed browsers do not provide protective measures against tracking via QUIC. However, the introduced mechanisms reset during a browser restart, which clears the cached connection data and thus limits achievable tracking periods. To mitigate the identified privacy issues, we propose changes to QUIC’s protocol design, the operation of QUIC-enabled web servers, and browser implementations. https://petsymposium.org/2019/files/papers/issue3/popets-2019-0046.pdf Questo è un paper del 2019, non mi pare sia già passato in lista. QUIC è stato introdotto da Google in Chrome nel 2013 ed in meno di 6 anni gestiva già il 7% del traffico mondiale, nonostante sia ancora una bozza IETF in stato "I-D EXISTS". Per capire l'ambizione del progetto (ed il potere di Google), l'IETF potrebbe chiamare "HTTP/3" l'adattamento dell'HTTP a QUIC. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/quic/documents/ Inutile dire che QUIC è progettato bene: https://http3.net/ MA è progettato anzitutto per ridurre problemi (e costi) di scalabilità che affrontano società come Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare... ma che sono irrilevanti per chiunque altro. Lato utente, QUIC renderà molto più veloce il caricamento di pagine Web che scaricano molte risorse separate da fonti diverse. In altri termini, i cittadini potranno farsi sorvegliare più in fretta. Giacomo

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Re: [nexa] Privacy Bug Found in Apple, Google COVID-Tracing
by Giuseppe Attardi Sept. 13, 2020

Sept. 13, 2020

> On 13 Sep 2020, at 12:00, nexa-request(a)server-nexa.polito.it wrote: > > Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2020 20:16:05 +0200 > From: Roberto Resoli <roberto(a)resolutions.it <mailto:roberto@resolutions.it>> > To: nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it <mailto:nexa@server-nexa.polito.it> > Subject: Re: [nexa] Privacy Bug Found in Apple, Google COVID-Tracing > Framework > Message-ID: <8A70ADE4-C07D-427D-9453-616E5949D272(a)resolutions.it <mailto:8A70ADE4-C07D-427D-9453-616E5949D272@resolutions.it>> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 > > Il 12 settembre 2020 19:48:32 CEST, Roberto Resoli <roberto(a)resolutions.it <mailto:roberto@resolutions.it>> ha scritto: >> Il 12 settembre 2020 19:28:30 CEST, Antonio Iacono <antiac(a)gmail.com <mailto:antiac@gmail.com>> >> ha scritto: >>> https://decrypt.co/40765/privacy-bug-found-apple-google-covid-tracing-frame… <https://decrypt.co/40765/privacy-bug-found-apple-google-covid-tracing-frame…> >> >> Mmm... devo ancora leggere tutto, ma: >> >> "The Google/Apple framework is proprietary and closed-source." >> >> e invece mi risulta che il sorgente sia disponibile dal 26 Luglio: >> https://github.com/google/exposure-notifications-internals <https://github.com/google/exposure-notifications-internals> > > Come riportato in uno dei commenti all'articolo, pare che la cosa fosse già nota, ma non considerata un rischio apprezzabile, perchè il periodo in cui è possibile collegare due mac non supera mai un periodo di emissione dei RPI (10 min): > > https://github.com/google/exposure-notifications-internals/blob/main/README… <https://github.com/google/exposure-notifications-internals/blob/main/README…> L'attacco viene assimilato ai sassolini di Little Thumb, che però erano persistenti, mentre in questo caso le tracce sono evanescenti. Per poter tracciare in continuazione una persona, andrebbe pedinata da vicino in continuazione, un atto ben più invadente e inquietante. — > > rob > >

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Democracy Live Internet voting & MORE ...
by Diego Latella Sept. 13, 2020

Sept. 13, 2020

FROM RISKS 31.97: Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 10:29:39 PDT From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann(a)CSL.SRI.COM <mailto:neumann@CSL.SRI.COM>> Subject: Democracy Live Internet voting: unsurprisingly insecure, and surprisingly insecure (Specter and Halderman, with Andrew Appel's comments via PGN) A new report by Michael Specter (MIT) and Alex Halderman (U. of Michigan) <https://internetpolicy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/OmniBallot.pdf <https://internetpolicy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/OmniBallot.pdf>> demonstrates that the OmniBallot Internet voting system from Democracy Live <https://democracylive.com/ <https://democracylive.com/>> is fatally insecure. That by itself is not surprising, as *no known technology* could make it secure. What is surprising is all the /unexpected/ insecurities that Democracy Live crammed into OmniBallot -- and the way that Democracy Live skims so much of the voter's private information. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2020/06/08/democracy-live-internet-voting-uns… <https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2020/06/08/democracy-live-internet-voting-uns…> Andrew Appel <appel(a)princeton.edu <mailto:appel@princeton.edu>> has posted an extremely relevant article in Freedom-to-Tinker: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/author/appel/ <https://freedom-to-tinker.com/author/appel/> The OmniBallot Internet voting system from Democracy Live finds surprising new ways to be insecure, in addition to the usual (severe, fatal) insecurities common to all Internet voting systems. There's a very clear scientific consensus that ``the Internet should not be used for the return of marked ballots'' because ``no known technology guarantees the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot transmitted over the Internet.'' That's from the National Academies 2018 consensus study report <https://doi.org/10.17226/25120 <https://doi.org/10.17226/25120>>, consistent with the May 2020 recommendations from the U.S. EAC/NIST/FBI/CISA. <http://s3.amazonaws.com/ftt-uploads/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/07210015/Fin… <http://s3.amazonaws.com/ftt-uploads/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/07210015/Fin…>> [Please read the entire paper and Andrew's commentary. They are very revealing, and devastating for those persons who believe that Internet voting can be made secure. Every known attempt seems to have been easily defeated: Washington DC 2010, Estonia 2014, Australia 2015, Scytl in Switzerland 2019, Voatz in West Virginia 2020, OmniBallot now. Insiders at any of four private companies (Democracy Live, Google, Amazon, Cloudflare), or any hackers who manage to hack into these companies, can steal votes: Democracy Live doesn't run its own servers. PGN-excerpted] FROM the US Government Accountability Office: Facial Recognition Technology: Privacy and Accuracy Issues Related to Commercial Uses GAO-20-522: Published: Jul 13, 2020. Publicly Released: Aug 11, 2020. https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-20-522?utm_campaign=usgao_email&utm_conten… Facial Recognition: CBP and TSA are Taking Steps to Implement Programs, but CBP Should Address Privacy and System Performance Issues GAO-20-568: Published: Sep 2, 2020. Publicly Released: Sep 2, 2020. https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-20-568?utm_campaign=usgao_email&utm_conten… Dott. Diego Latella - Senior Researcher CNR-ISTI, Via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa, Italy (http:www.isti.cnr.it) FM&&T Lab. (http://fmt.isti.cnr.it) http://www.isti.cnr.it/People/D.Latella - ph: +390506212982, mob: +39 348 8283101, fax: +390506212040 =================== The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn how to achieve it by love rather than by fear, by kindness rather than compulsion; if in the process we learn how to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task. Above all, remember your humanity. -- Sir Joseph Rotblat

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On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles
by Giacomo Tesio Sept. 13, 2020

Sept. 13, 2020

Christiane C. didn’t think anything of it when her 10-year-old daughter and a friend uploaded a video of themselves playing in a backyard pool. “The video is innocent, it’s not a big deal,” said Christiane, who lives in a Rio de Janeiro suburb. A few days later, her daughter shared exciting news: The video had thousands of views. Before long, it had ticked up to 400,000 — a staggering number for a video of a child in a two-piece bathing suit with her friend. “I saw the video again and I got scared by the number of views,” Christiane said. She had reason to be. YouTube’s automated recommendation system — which drives most of the platform’s billions of views by suggesting what users should watch next — had begun showing the video to users who watched other videos of prepubescent, partially clothed children, a team of researchers has found. YouTube had curated the videos from across its archives, at times plucking out the otherwise innocuous home movies of unwitting families, the researchers say. In many cases, its algorithm referred users to the videos after they watched sexually themed content. The result was a catalog of videos that experts say sexualizes children. “It’s YouTube’s algorithm that connects these channels,” said Jonas Kaiser, one of three researchers at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society who stumbled onto the videos while looking into YouTube’s impact in Brazil. “That’s the scary thing.” The video of Christiane’s daughter was promoted by YouTube’s systems months after the company was alerted that it had a pedophile problem. In February, Wired and other news outlets reported that predators were using the comment section of YouTube videos with children to guide other pedophiles. That month, calling the problem “deeply concerning,” YouTube disabled comments on many videos with children in them. But the recommendation system, which remains in place, has gathered dozens of such videos into a new and easily viewable repository, and pushed them out to a vast audience. YouTube never set out to serve users with sexual interests in children — but in the end, Mr. Kaiser said, its automated system managed to keep them watching with recommendations that he called “disturbingly on point.” Users do not need to look for videos of children to end up watching them. The platform can lead them there through a progression of recommendations. So a user who watches erotic videos might be recommended videos of women who become conspicuously younger, and then women who pose provocatively in children’s clothes. Eventually, some users might be presented with videos of girls as young as 5 or 6 wearing bathing suits, or getting dressed or doing a split. On its own, each video might be perfectly innocent, a home movie, say, made by a child. Any revealing frames are fleeting and appear accidental. But, grouped together, their shared features become unmistakable. [...] When The Times alerted YouTube that its system was circulating family videos to people seemingly motivated by sexual interest in children, the company removed several but left up many others, including some apparently uploaded by fake accounts. The recommendation system itself also immediately changed, no longer linking some of the revealing videos together. YouTube said this was probably a result of routine tweaks to its algorithms, rather than a deliberate policy change. [...] But YouTube has not put in place the one change that researchers say would prevent this from happening again: turning off its recommendation system on videos of children, though the platform can identify such videos automatically. The company said that because recommendations are the biggest traffic driver, removing them would hurt “creators” who rely on those clicks. It did say it would limit recommendations on videos that it deems as putting children at risk. [...] And the extraordinary view counts — sometimes in the millions — indicated that the system had found an audience for the videos and was keeping that audience engaged. Some researchers believe that when it comes to some material, engaging certain interests risks encouraging them as well. “It’s incredibly powerful, and people get drawn into that,” said Stephen Blumenthal, a London-based psychologist who treats people for deviant sexual interests and behaviors. And YouTube, by showing videos of children alongside more mainstream sexual content, as well as displaying the videos’ high view counts, risked eroding the taboo against pedophilia, psychologists said. “You normalize it,” said Marcus Rogers, a psychologist at Purdue who has done research on child pornography. YouTube says there is no rabbit hole effect. “It’s not clear to us that necessarily our recommendation engine takes you in one direction or another,” said Ms. O’Connor, the product director. Still, she said, “when it comes to kids, we just want to take a much more conservative stance for what we recommend.” # Children at Risk Most people who view sexualized imagery leave it at that, researchers say. But some of the videos on YouTube include links to the youngsters’ social media accounts. “A lot of people that are actively involved in chatting with kids are very, very adept at grooming these kids into posting more sexualized pictures or engaging in sexual activity and having it videotaped,” said Dr. Rogers. YouTube does not allow children under 13 to have channels. The company says it enforces the policy aggressively. For parents, there are no easy solutions, said Jenny Coleman, the director of Stop It Now, an organization that combats sexual exploitation of children. “Even the most careful of families can get swept into something that is harmful or criminal,” she said. In reporting this article, when The Times could find contact information for parents of children in the videos, it contacted local organizations that could help them. After one such organization contacted Christiane, the mother from Brazil, she offered to discuss her experience. Furious, she is struggling to absorb what had happened. She fretted over what to tell her husband. She expressed confusion at YouTube’s practices. And she worried over how to keep her daughter, now on display to a city-size audience, safe. “The only thing I can do,” she said, “is forbid her to publish anything on YouTube.” Tratto da https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/world/americas/youtube-pedophiles.html Notare due aspetti: - guarda caso, dopo la segnalazione, Google effetua alcuni "routine tweaks to its algorithms" che cambiano il sistema di raccomandazioni (quanto meno per i reporter e per chi cerca verifiche per l'articolo) - i rischi per i bambini sono secondari rispetto ai profitti di Google^W^W dei "content creators" indifesi (:-D) Dunque le intelligenze artificiali non sono sempre black box per chi le configura, tanto da poter minimizzare l'impatto di un'articolo disgustoso sui profitti. Giacomo PS: Mai caricare video su YouTube, TikTok etc... neanche di bambini! ;-)

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