Content-Oblivious Trust & Safety Techniques

Riana will present the results of a survey about the trust and safety (T&S) techniques of a group of online service providers that collectively serve a significant proportion of the world's internet users. Her research seeks to highlight some lesser-known approaches to T&S that are pertinent to ongoing policy debates about regulatory responses to online abuse. Contrary to what policymakers may believe, her findings indicate that effective abuse detection does not necessarily require providers to have access to user content, nor does end-to-end encryption impede abuse detection efforts as much as is usually assumed. These findings have implications for policy debates over the regulation of online service providers’ anti-abuse obligations and their use of end-to-end encryption. Riana Pfefferkorn is a Research Scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Date & Time: November 10, 2022, at 2:00 PM PST 

Location: Virtual