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> Earlier this year we saw an increase in the number of reports we received about some people using our service in ways that we cannot tolerate. To be more clear, this was not about some people merely saying things that others disliked.

That’s only slightly more clear, since it just says what’s not happening. Does anyone know what is happening? Does it involve potential violations of law, or is it just the TOS?



My guess would be pornography. That seems like the most obvious use of a video calling service, and something that would cause them to run afoul of various legal requirements (e.g. age verification / records keeping).


> My guess would be pornography.

Sexually explicit "meetings" wouldn't even be a particularly surprising use case, and 18 USC 2257 has a bunch of carve-outs for service providers.

My suspicion is that there was CSAM or similarly abhorrent content being broadcast in meetings. Unfortunately, this is a class of users which would be drawn to a service which promised anonymity and E2E encryption.


Similar services are used for sharing revenge porn, so I absolutely believe it happens with CSAM too.


Given what they provided you can be sure it involved stuff like CP, human traffican, forced prostitution.

All things you don't want your company to be associated with so you don't name it.

If it would just have been things which are illegal but not that problematic like copyright violations or a bit of (legal, non forced) porn they might have spelled it out.


Child pornography, ISIS, Wagner, Cartels, there's plenty of candidates that you really don't want to name in public.


If the content broadcasted is E2E, how do they even know?


A meeting that anyone can join without authentication is not a private meeting, even if the video streams are end-to-end encrypted.


Probably because they've been tipped off to that activity by law enforcement.


people reporting it to you

e.g. people which investigate forced porn stumbling over a forced porn site which uses your service


Bet you dollars to donuts its CSAM


just remember some ways in which Zoom was used.


Zoom... 25 years ago I left an MBONE service running unsupervised and changed roles. 6 months later a colleague sent me the dic pix that were being shared in low-fi B&W slowscan MBONE video.


heh. To be clear I wasn't referring to mere nudity or p0rn, I don't think it is even illegal? That's just morality policing.

Gotta wonder if Mbone was also used for the really ugly stuff which is in fact very illegal.


Reaching back even further, we were told in the very early 1980s by the University of York computer centre that all line printer overstrike images were henceforth banned, after it was noted the operators had printed a reasonably hi-res full length nude, burning at least one ribbon to shreds doing it. I think it was 6 sheets of fanfold in 3x3


Ah those innocent times




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