Maintain a high-pressure crackdown on camera peeping black production

■ Wei Chen

On January 17, netizens broke the news that some users uploaded surveillance videos from multiple teacher lectures, hospital nurses' desks, and hotel front desks to Bilibili Danmaku Network (Station B), and the pictures were suspected of using illegal means to crack webcams in public places. In this regard, Station B responded, removed and banned relevant content and accounts, and reported to the competent department for follow-up investigation.

From May to August last year, the Central Cyberspace Administration and other departments organized centralized management of camera peeping black production nationwide. Under the heavy blow, the media visit found that the sales of camera equipment have turned from light to dark, and the black industrial chain of online sales is still surging undercurrents. Whether it is a public place or a private place, the collection, viewing and dissemination of surveillance video should have certain rules, taking into account technical efficiency and personal privacy. The surveillance footage of the public place was publicly disseminated on the B station, and the reply in the comment area was quite explicit, and the degree of rampantness could be seen.

The huge number of users of Station B has exposed the camera peeping black industry to the public eye, triggering people's concerns about personal privacy. By exploiting the camera's security vulnerabilities, criminals can scan the whole network of devices with weak passwords, and use illegal software to gain unauthorized access to the camera, realize remote control of the camera, and watch and play back surveillance video online. In other words, even if you install a camera in your own home, it is not necessarily safe. Cameras can be cracked by illegal means, first of all, a wake-up call to people. Factors such as camera quality, fragile cloud security protection, and weak passwords used on the application side may lead to personal privacy leakage. This also means that in the era of information nudity, information acquisition and technical convenience go hand in hand, and while enjoying the convenience of technology, try to avoid information leakage, which should become the information literacy that individuals need to consciously cultivate.

The most important thing is to maintain a continuous crackdown on voyeuristic black production, and avoid the criminals from returning to a vest after being banned and deleted. In 2017, Beijing police smashed the country's first case of online dissemination of home cameras to crack the software crime chain, and arrested 24 people involved in the case. In December 2020, the verdict was pronounced in the first civil public interest litigation case of using the Internet to infringe on privacy, and 65 people, including Zhang Moudong, who made and sold illegal cracked software, were fined. Considering that the camera cracking technology is becoming increasingly hidden and professional, and the illegal cracking software will continue to be updated and iterated, the regulatory authorities need to continue to carry out spot checks on camera manufacturers and video surveillance cloud platforms on the one hand to check for security risks; on the other hand, it is necessary to strengthen the institutionalization of scientific and technological ethics and guide technology to goodness.

For a platform like Station B, it is necessary to further play the filtering role of the content moderation mechanism. Content risk control is the lifeline of the content community, and it is also the key to maintaining the PUGV model that relies on UP's main creation and promoting traffic growth. Comprehensively cleaning up the illegal and harmful information related to the camera peeping on the platform is not only the main responsibility of performing the information release review, but also avoids the loss of users due to dissatisfaction with the "random audit".