I can't find a widely accepted statistic but these numbers should illustrate the point:
- A 2016 study by the Center for Court Innovation found that between 8,900 and 10,500 children, ages 13 to 17, are commercially exploited each year in the United States. (Center for Court Innovation, 2016) https://www.courtinnovation.org/sites/default/files/document...
- The annual number of persons prosecuted for commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) cases filed in U.S. district court nearly doubled between 2004 and 2013, increasing from 1,405 to 2,776 cases. https://www.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh241/files/archives/p...
This is a niche crime from everything I've seen.
Apple, if it were truly interested in the net good of children, could have picked something that impacts more of them (nutrition? early childhood education?), didn't introduce new vulnerability / abuse surface area, and was less politicized.
This seems unbelievably high (though I have no reason to doubt the researchers).
If the prevalence is really around 8-30%, this seems a lot bigger than what Apple could even make a dent in. (Because most of the offenders are relatives/acquaintances of the victims. The phones don't seem to have any influence on the underlying numbers.)
Furthermore, criminalizing content again pushes the actual problem deeper into the shadows.
Why there are no routine questions about abuse for kids? At least that would help to identify victims, remove them from the abusive environment, and even potentially help catch the perpetrator.
Thanks for the statistics. To me, these numbers are significant.
Maybe Whole Foods or maybe some popular restaurants are better candidates for working on improving nutrition in public schools? Why don’t we let apple contribute where it thinks it can. Maybe with apple that number goes down from 10,000 to 2,000. Wouldn’t that be a celebrated outcome?
We cannot stop all crime. There will never be a day where we stop all crime. It is not an achievable goal nor is it desirable because what constitutes a crime is written by the governments of the world and we have tens of thousands of years of reigning authorities to tell us that they will abuse the power they are invested with to protect themselves.
Authority and its keeping is the number two law of the jungle. Any power handed over in the name of security, "to stop all crime", is an affirmation, a concretization of its future abuse. You speak of the calculated cost of preventing child abuse as acceptable. What of the abuse of an entire people?
This is not handwavy theoreticals. We already know what happens, in the US, when you push an agenda in the name of protecting the children: it looks like FOSTA/SESTA, which has driven sex workers of America underground and exposed them to more violence, more danger in a profession already one of the most murderous professions in the world. Those murders, in the name of protecting the young, are at the feet of the people who would protect the children with more authority.
What would be insignificant? 1 child? 100? There are 73,000,000 children (under 18) in the US alone. 10,000 is .0001% of that population.
> Why don’t we let apple contribute where it thinks it can.
Apple is the most profitable company in the world. It's a company that prides itself on its imagination and innovation, I wouldn't discount their ability to come up with something.
> Maybe with apple that number goes down from 10,000 to 2,000. Wouldn’t that be a celebrated outcome?
No, it's not. We make trade-offs all the time. The possible harm to Apple's user base is not worth the possibility that this reduces child abuse. There's a possibility these people move on to another platform and this does nothing.
To get that number down Apple creates an entry point for violating the privacy of half a billion users worldwide. Many of them are in China, where pressure from the government has already moved Apple in directions that are harmful to its customers[1].
