10 ms·

The guy who made a tool to track women in porn videos is sorry

55 points by theBashShell 7y ago

bem94 7y ago
It's things like this that make me think all engineers need more training on the social consequences of the tools they build. This is an extreme case and I hope most engineers would look at this and understand how awful & damaging it could be; but given our influence on the world nowadays (as a class, if not always as individuals) we really need to be much more aware of what we're doing and how it affects people.
- otabdeveloper1 7y ago
  What's "awful" and "damaging" about outing whores? Or is this a case where a random shitty woman gets a free pass on acting antisocially and sociopathically just because she happens to be a woman? Protip: she's a sociopath and not going to be grateful or reward you for your altruism. You're just gonna be used.
  - dang 7y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- xwdv 7y ago
  The problem is that engineers are not always the ones in charge of the entire end result. If you want to do something unethical you can just split it up into harmless individual tasks and give it to a dozen engineers and then put it all together. It’s obfuscation. Some of the greatest atrocities we will see in tech (and we will see them) in the coming century will be the result of combining things created with good intentions. Not much we can do I’m afraid except endure.
  - whenchamenia 7y ago
    An engineer can quit if the project is unethical. Just 'enduring' is harmful to yourself, and others. Don't be a coward, at least stand up for your values.
    - ravenstine 7y ago
      I agree with that sentiment a lot, but that's also easier said than done when one has a family, a mortgage, etc. Standing up for principles might seem worth it when losing a home and potentially screwing up one's family might since, if one quits, there are hordes of young sociopathic engineers who will continue the "disrupting" without you. That said, a lot of engineers actually are in the position to make demands. The chances of getting fired for saying "I'm not going to do that because it's wrong" are probably very low. Most managers would rather not feel bad, and hiring someone new is usually touted as being a pain in the ass.
      - close04 7y ago
        But doesn’t this apply to a doctor or lawyer who also have an ethics code to follow? Or basically any other line of work. The difference being that even a single software engineer’s work has a huge impact on society these days. More than any one doctor or lawyer. There may be some very good reasons that I haven’t thought of not to support this ethics idea. But putting food on the table shouldn’t be it because this one reason applies to any activity that could ever put food on the table, no matter how illegal, immoral, etc.
    - phkahler 7y ago
      >> An engineer can quit if the project is unethical. Is creating face recognition software unethical? Your answer is not really important, just the fact that different people will classify this differently. I thought it was creepy as f* when facebook started wanting to automatically tag people in photos. But if that's all the tech was for it may well be ethical, if creepy to some. And yet, face recognition is really all that was used in this case - matching up porn images with social media ones.
- todd8 7y ago
  I agree, but I don’t think education will end up solving the problem. Somewhere out there, there is a sociopathic engineer that will make antisocial choices anyway. Software is so easy to copy that it proliferates too easily. If a mechanical engineer creates some evil weapon, say a gun that shoots frozen mercury slugs (just to make up a ridiculous example), we don’t really have to worry about the proliferation of cryogenic weapons. When a software engineer pushes some questionable program’s source to github it’s game over.
- internet_user 7y ago
  You do realize that morality and ethics can be drastically different from yours, and what you are proposing really amounts to "let's civilize those savages" ?
- listenallyall 7y ago
  What if a convenience store had security video of a clerk being shot and killed. Nobody recognizes the suspect's face in the video, so they want to use this tool to bring the killer to justice. Is that legal? Is it GPDR-complant? Clearly, the killer is not consenting. Another scenario: a neo-Nazi protest rally occurs, and counter-protesters use this tool to determine who the Nazis are, in order to publicly shame them. Is this OK? Again, the Nazis have not consented to the use of their images to shame or "out" them. You could go on and on... a vigilant neighbor filming a "porch pirate" stealing packages... someone filming people leaving a gay bar, an abortion clinic, a "massage parlor". Someone constantly running red lights. Who decides what is shaming vs what is "protecting people"?
jonnycomputer 7y ago
I'm not sure I understand the GDPR argument here. Is collecting the facial information from actors and actresses in porn movies illegal? Or was it the access of their social media accounts? Why is the tallying of what is publicly consumable a violation of GDPR?
- thrower123 7y ago
  You are thinking that GDPR is something logical and consistent, which is a mistake. In reality it's a cudgel that can be employed at whim.
  - julienreszka 7y ago
    Is it tho
- tobr 7y ago
  GDPR deals with processing of personal data, not just collection or canonical records of it. If personal data passes through a system, it’s probably covered by GDPR.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- barrkel 7y ago
  The doctrine of public view meaning there are no rights to be enforced is not internationally recognised. Google even gave up on Street View in Germany, despite public streets being public. There are good logical and moral reasons, IMO, why the doctrine is unsound. For example: individual photos are qualitatively different to movies, even though movies are made up of individual photos; the fixed interval conveys speed, which individual photos are quite poor at. Similarly, pervasive photography is different to individual photography: instead of an incident at a single location, someone's whole day may be mapped out, and who they're talking to, etc. In other words, reasoning about privacy is not transitive or scale invariant. You can't say that the end result is ok or moral based on its component parts. Composition changes the thing qualitatively.
zamadatix 7y ago
What are the GDPR repercussions for an open source project that does not make money, has no ties to an organization, holds only code, and handles no data?
- kyberias 7y ago
  If there is no data, obviously GDPR doesn't apply.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    I'm more focusing on this section of the article where the legal source says 2 interesting things: "just collecting the data is illegal if the women didn’t consent, according to Börge Seeger, a data protection expert and partner at German law firm Neuwerk. These laws apply to any information from EU residents, so they would have held even if the programmer weren’t living in the EU." #1 the programmer is implicated (it's possible this is in the context of "the programmer" also being "user in Europe") #2 even if they weren't living in the EU #2 is the particularly interesting one and also opens up the general question of "what happens if <external group> collects data but does not handle monetary transactions in Europe or deal with money abroad". GPDR is very much written around how to wrangle companies in financially, what if it's not a company?
majkinetor 7y ago
Not sure how this relates to GDPR - the arguments are nonsensical. People tend to bump everything under GDPR now like its some form of gods commandment. If I simply sit in the cafe watching someone continuously near me, I am collecting data, and nobody can do anything about it. When you leave your home, your privacy is gone. When you make anything public your privacy is gone. Not sure anything is ethically wrong with the software existence, the problem seems to be data usage, just as if somebody found out his neighbors wife is in porn and went to twitter and said it publicly with few pictures as a proof, and people do that. It's naive to think that this thing can/will go away, if anything, because of this news alone who knows how many more random programmers are retrying this (or even make business plans) at this very moment.
- geezerjay 7y ago
  > Not sure how this relates to GDPR GDPR states that the lawful basis for processing of data depends, among other things, on: * the individual's explicit consent to the processing of his or her personal data. * protecting the vital interests of a data subject or another individual This violates both criteria, thus is indirect violation of the GDPR.
  - majkinetor 7y ago
    * Face is not considered personal data AFAIK * What the heck is vital interest ? For person playing in a movie it may as well be that everybody watch it.
    - geezerjay 7y ago
      * Photos of a person is personal data, particularly those that are scraped from social networks. This is pretty much the whole point of GDPR. * Screwing up someone's life, as it is extensively desribed in the article, fits well into the definition of "vital interest". I find it quite baffling how someone posting on HN is oblivious to the link between GDPR and the need to punish those who abuse data collected from social networks against the wishes and best interests of the users to screw up their lives.
orthoxerox 7y ago
Russian imageboards found VK profiles of quite a few porn actresses and prostitutes using findface.ru. Of course, they immediately started harrassing them and sending messages to everyone in their friends list. However, ethics aside, the cat is out of the bag. People can shame the guy into deleting the data, but computing power will only get cheaper and data matchers faster. Sooner or later some will do this again and launch a Tor site with an up-to-date database. We have to adjust to the idea that if you have a social media profile any public images of you will lead people to it sooner or later. And it will be sooner, not later, with every passing year.
- sametmax 7y ago
  Yes, but that shoudln't prevent society to also make those particular use of tech very costly. It should be consider like holding a concealed weapon: you need a permit, or you get jail time. Permit should not be hard to get, as long as you can justify professional or research need. But letting this go is creating a society I don't want to live it. I already hate, living my anonymous life, when some stranger take my photo without asking. It happens more and more. On the other end, people filming the police get in more and more trouble. We got things reversed.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    How is this possibly enforceable though? The software is already out there and available. In countries that restrict guns, it's often quite hard to get one outside the legal channels (if there are any), so enforcement is pretty effective. But for something you can just download??
    - ashelmire 7y ago
      Not just download, but write yourself in a short time. And the code could be shared, and I’d guess you can build a decent system to do this in a few hundred lines. It’s a ridiculous proposition to restrict software access, akin to making it illegal to write on paper.
samat 7y ago
The same story about Findface project was big news in Russia several years ago. They scraped the whole vk.com (Russian Facebook copycat with almost entire Russian population in it) and applied some very fine ML to find a person by his/her face. 2ch (4chan ancestor) users identified girls from porn and harassed them, outing them to their families and friends using this service. Later company discontinued this service and now sells technology to the Russian government to monitor CCTV footage from Moscow subway. VK kind of fixed data scraping issue (not sure if they actually changed much). Usually Russia copies everything from the west, interesting to see western news follow Russian lead after a few years. Not saying I am proud of mother Russia in this case, just an observation.
gmuslera 7y ago
The bigger problem are not the right matches, but the wrong ones, specially if they are very similar. This should affect far more people than just ex-porn actresses.
- keiru 7y ago
  I'm gladly surprised that "lookalike revenge porn" isn't already a thing (that I know of)
- nkurz 7y ago
  While false-positives are definitely a problem, why do you think they are a bigger problem? Do you feel the participants in pornography are "fair game" but the others are innocent? In some ways, the current level of inaccuracy could be considered an advantage, because it makes it more likely that there will be resistance. A 100% accurate system strikes me as more dangerous, as it's less likely for politicians or lawmakers to stand up for the victims.
  - keiru 7y ago
    Despite agreeing with your latter points, there's a reason why shrapnel damage is comparably serious. Although most people who did some porn are most likely not proffesionals, most porn (by volume) is done by people who might even consider your finding part of their CV. So going by sheer numbers alone, there might be so much more cases of false positives. Now, even if it becomes terribly obvious how inaccurate it is, I don't think that matters much when it comes to weaponising it, because people are easily fooled or don't care. As long as you kind find a vid of a girl that looks just like Clara from accounting, you can spread it as a false rumor. Or not even claim it's her; it's just as embarrassing. And that's even assuming you could tell them appart, because the seed of doubt extends the problem to people who didn't even do porn. For comparison think of deepfakes. Everybody knows it's not actually Emma Watson, but I bet she isn't particularly happy about it.
kabwj 7y ago
Why should pornography actors not have responsibilities for what they do? I don’t agree with this part where people who 1) put their faces in pornography and 2) put their faces in social media should not expect the two things to be correlated. Especially since the technology has already existed for some time and it cannot be stopped. Are we looking for regulation here? Is that exactly what we want, going back to cryptography export laws?
- mannykannot 7y ago
  The same principle would, of course, apply equally to this anonymous programmer.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Youcandothis 7y ago
  > Why should pornography actors not have responsibilities for what they do? They should have a right for privacy.
  - hurryskurry 7y ago
    How is the right to privacy being violated though? Imagine you were a stripper or porn actress, your right to privacy wouldn't preclude someone recognizing you at the strip club or video. Or suppose you went to the strip club or watched a video and then also happened to be on Facebook and saw the profile of someone you saw stripping at a strip club or in the video, matching the face and name in your head. How is the slow case different fundamentally from the case where programming is used and throughput and speed is much higher and faster? I mean would it be illegal for someone to just start going through Facebook profiles by hand trying to find an actress they just saw?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - 7y ago
bitL 7y ago
Bypassing the stupid issue of harassing actresses by likely teenagers, isn't a husband-to-be right to know about the past of his fiancee? Is the moral right of not being outed outweighing the moral right of not being deceived in a very important matter? Where is the line?
- jonnycomputer 7y ago
  What right of the husband-to-be are you talking about? Is failing to tell someone something the same thing as deception? Is this supposed right symmetric? Does bride-to-be have the right to know if the husband participated in porn video?
  - bitL 7y ago
    > Is failing to tell someone something the same thing as deception? Yes, absolutely. Imagine you are the only person that doesn't know your fiance was in porn and you committed to her without knowing that. > Is this supposed right symmetric? Does bride-to-be have the right to know if the husband participated in porn video? Of course. Even though social stigma for males is lower, it has a devastating impact on their business relationships.
    - jonnycomputer 7y ago
      If you are the only one who doesn't know your fiance was in porn, then you are a fool or have no friends.
    - jonnycomputer 7y ago
      You still haven't actually answered the question of what "right" there is supposed to be. If a person is afraid that their fiance might have done porn in the past, or if they care so damn much, they should just ask the person.
      - bitL 7y ago
        If people were honest to each other all the time, we wouldn't need laws. Let's be generous and assume your question is just naive - could you ever envision a situation where an innocent husband-to-be (e.g. a nice, do-no-harm person and with reasonable means) is taken advantage of by a clever woman (with what is perceivably considered shady past in the given era) for her own material benefit? Do you think this never happens (hint: belletry is full of such situations and I'd recommend you to investigate common causes of suicide)? Doesn't husband-to-be have a justified interest in protecting his life, reputation, possessions from the baggage the unvetted fiancee brings? Do you think the fiancee wouldn't lie as much as possible in order to protect her planned future? If you truly are just naive, please think about the points I mentioned; if not, there is no point to discuss, as your mind is set in stone anyway.
hurryskurry 7y ago
If the videos are published, and the social media profiles public, how can it be illegal to match the two? Supposedly if they show their face they already accept the danger of being recognized, unless the video was published illegally. That said, why would someone, once someone was identified, just go about harassing them and telling all their friends they do porn? Like who does that?
- jddj 7y ago
  The internet has enabled some people to deploy complex systems into New York datacenters from a beach in Thailand in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, it's also enabled a selection of less socially aware and/or socially responsible people to bypass the natural limits and filters that society had in place, to effectively cause suffering on a fairly broad scale. Harrassing somebody on the other side of the world from the safe anonymity of your bedroom was once logistically very difficult, as was reaching significant numbers of people with a wildly malicious idea if you couldn't first find people in your immediate (physical) social circle and community to vouch for you/it. Now, we have entire online communities which have embraced this new normal and provided these folk with the tools and an audience.
- DougN7 7y ago
  My guess is there are many that did porn when they were younger (and foolish?) but have since moved on with life and might want to forget that episode or their life. So having it resurface 10 years later would be very uncomfortable.

55 points by theBashShell 7y ago

It's things like this that make me think all engineers need more training on the social consequences of the tools they build. This is an extreme case and I hope most engineers would look at this and understand how awful & damaging it could be; but given our influence on the world nowadays (as a class, if not always as individuals) we really need to be much more aware of what we're doing and how it affects people.

otabdeveloper1 7y ago
What's "awful" and "damaging" about outing whores? Or is this a case where a random shitty woman gets a free pass on acting antisocially and sociopathically just because she happens to be a woman? Protip: she's a sociopath and not going to be grateful or reward you for your altruism. You're just gonna be used.
- dang 7y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
xwdv 7y ago
The problem is that engineers are not always the ones in charge of the entire end result. If you want to do something unethical you can just split it up into harmless individual tasks and give it to a dozen engineers and then put it all together. It’s obfuscation. Some of the greatest atrocities we will see in tech (and we will see them) in the coming century will be the result of combining things created with good intentions. Not much we can do I’m afraid except endure.
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  An engineer can quit if the project is unethical. Just 'enduring' is harmful to yourself, and others. Don't be a coward, at least stand up for your values.
  - ravenstine 7y ago
    I agree with that sentiment a lot, but that's also easier said than done when one has a family, a mortgage, etc. Standing up for principles might seem worth it when losing a home and potentially screwing up one's family might since, if one quits, there are hordes of young sociopathic engineers who will continue the "disrupting" without you. That said, a lot of engineers actually are in the position to make demands. The chances of getting fired for saying "I'm not going to do that because it's wrong" are probably very low. Most managers would rather not feel bad, and hiring someone new is usually touted as being a pain in the ass.
    - close04 7y ago
      But doesn’t this apply to a doctor or lawyer who also have an ethics code to follow? Or basically any other line of work. The difference being that even a single software engineer’s work has a huge impact on society these days. More than any one doctor or lawyer. There may be some very good reasons that I haven’t thought of not to support this ethics idea. But putting food on the table shouldn’t be it because this one reason applies to any activity that could ever put food on the table, no matter how illegal, immoral, etc.
  - phkahler 7y ago
    >> An engineer can quit if the project is unethical. Is creating face recognition software unethical? Your answer is not really important, just the fact that different people will classify this differently. I thought it was creepy as f* when facebook started wanting to automatically tag people in photos. But if that's all the tech was for it may well be ethical, if creepy to some. And yet, face recognition is really all that was used in this case - matching up porn images with social media ones.
todd8 7y ago
I agree, but I don’t think education will end up solving the problem. Somewhere out there, there is a sociopathic engineer that will make antisocial choices anyway. Software is so easy to copy that it proliferates too easily. If a mechanical engineer creates some evil weapon, say a gun that shoots frozen mercury slugs (just to make up a ridiculous example), we don’t really have to worry about the proliferation of cryogenic weapons. When a software engineer pushes some questionable program’s source to github it’s game over.
internet_user 7y ago
You do realize that morality and ethics can be drastically different from yours, and what you are proposing really amounts to "let's civilize those savages" ?
listenallyall 7y ago
What if a convenience store had security video of a clerk being shot and killed. Nobody recognizes the suspect's face in the video, so they want to use this tool to bring the killer to justice. Is that legal? Is it GPDR-complant? Clearly, the killer is not consenting. Another scenario: a neo-Nazi protest rally occurs, and counter-protesters use this tool to determine who the Nazis are, in order to publicly shame them. Is this OK? Again, the Nazis have not consented to the use of their images to shame or "out" them. You could go on and on... a vigilant neighbor filming a "porch pirate" stealing packages... someone filming people leaving a gay bar, an abortion clinic, a "massage parlor". Someone constantly running red lights. Who decides what is shaming vs what is "protecting people"?

jonnycomputer 7y ago

I'm not sure I understand the GDPR argument here. Is collecting the facial information from actors and actresses in porn movies illegal? Or was it the access of their social media accounts? Why is the tallying of what is publicly consumable a violation of GDPR?

thrower123 7y ago
You are thinking that GDPR is something logical and consistent, which is a mistake. In reality it's a cudgel that can be employed at whim.
- julienreszka 7y ago
  Is it tho
tobr 7y ago
GDPR deals with processing of personal data, not just collection or canonical records of it. If personal data passes through a system, it’s probably covered by GDPR.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
barrkel 7y ago
The doctrine of public view meaning there are no rights to be enforced is not internationally recognised. Google even gave up on Street View in Germany, despite public streets being public. There are good logical and moral reasons, IMO, why the doctrine is unsound. For example: individual photos are qualitatively different to movies, even though movies are made up of individual photos; the fixed interval conveys speed, which individual photos are quite poor at. Similarly, pervasive photography is different to individual photography: instead of an incident at a single location, someone's whole day may be mapped out, and who they're talking to, etc. In other words, reasoning about privacy is not transitive or scale invariant. You can't say that the end result is ok or moral based on its component parts. Composition changes the thing qualitatively.

zamadatix 7y ago

What are the GDPR repercussions for an open source project that does not make money, has no ties to an organization, holds only code, and handles no data?

kyberias 7y ago
If there is no data, obviously GDPR doesn't apply.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zamadatix 7y ago
  I'm more focusing on this section of the article where the legal source says 2 interesting things: "just collecting the data is illegal if the women didn’t consent, according to Börge Seeger, a data protection expert and partner at German law firm Neuwerk. These laws apply to any information from EU residents, so they would have held even if the programmer weren’t living in the EU." #1 the programmer is implicated (it's possible this is in the context of "the programmer" also being "user in Europe") #2 even if they weren't living in the EU #2 is the particularly interesting one and also opens up the general question of "what happens if <external group> collects data but does not handle monetary transactions in Europe or deal with money abroad". GPDR is very much written around how to wrangle companies in financially, what if it's not a company?

majkinetor 7y ago

Not sure how this relates to GDPR - the arguments are nonsensical. People tend to bump everything under GDPR now like its some form of gods commandment. If I simply sit in the cafe watching someone continuously near me, I am collecting data, and nobody can do anything about it. When you leave your home, your privacy is gone. When you make anything public your privacy is gone. Not sure anything is ethically wrong with the software existence, the problem seems to be data usage, just as if somebody found out his neighbors wife is in porn and went to twitter and said it publicly with few pictures as a proof, and people do that. It's naive to think that this thing can/will go away, if anything, because of this news alone who knows how many more random programmers are retrying this (or even make business plans) at this very moment.

geezerjay 7y ago
> Not sure how this relates to GDPR GDPR states that the lawful basis for processing of data depends, among other things, on: * the individual's explicit consent to the processing of his or her personal data. * protecting the vital interests of a data subject or another individual This violates both criteria, thus is indirect violation of the GDPR.
- majkinetor 7y ago
  * Face is not considered personal data AFAIK * What the heck is vital interest ? For person playing in a movie it may as well be that everybody watch it.
  - geezerjay 7y ago
    * Photos of a person is personal data, particularly those that are scraped from social networks. This is pretty much the whole point of GDPR. * Screwing up someone's life, as it is extensively desribed in the article, fits well into the definition of "vital interest". I find it quite baffling how someone posting on HN is oblivious to the link between GDPR and the need to punish those who abuse data collected from social networks against the wishes and best interests of the users to screw up their lives.

orthoxerox 7y ago

Russian imageboards found VK profiles of quite a few porn actresses and prostitutes using findface.ru. Of course, they immediately started harrassing them and sending messages to everyone in their friends list. However, ethics aside, the cat is out of the bag. People can shame the guy into deleting the data, but computing power will only get cheaper and data matchers faster. Sooner or later some will do this again and launch a Tor site with an up-to-date database. We have to adjust to the idea that if you have a social media profile any public images of you will lead people to it sooner or later. And it will be sooner, not later, with every passing year.

sametmax 7y ago
Yes, but that shoudln't prevent society to also make those particular use of tech very costly. It should be consider like holding a concealed weapon: you need a permit, or you get jail time. Permit should not be hard to get, as long as you can justify professional or research need. But letting this go is creating a society I don't want to live it. I already hate, living my anonymous life, when some stranger take my photo without asking. It happens more and more. On the other end, people filming the police get in more and more trouble. We got things reversed.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  How is this possibly enforceable though? The software is already out there and available. In countries that restrict guns, it's often quite hard to get one outside the legal channels (if there are any), so enforcement is pretty effective. But for something you can just download??
  - ashelmire 7y ago
    Not just download, but write yourself in a short time. And the code could be shared, and I’d guess you can build a decent system to do this in a few hundred lines. It’s a ridiculous proposition to restrict software access, akin to making it illegal to write on paper.

samat 7y ago

The same story about Findface project was big news in Russia several years ago. They scraped the whole vk.com (Russian Facebook copycat with almost entire Russian population in it) and applied some very fine ML to find a person by his/her face. 2ch (4chan ancestor) users identified girls from porn and harassed them, outing them to their families and friends using this service. Later company discontinued this service and now sells technology to the Russian government to monitor CCTV footage from Moscow subway. VK kind of fixed data scraping issue (not sure if they actually changed much). Usually Russia copies everything from the west, interesting to see western news follow Russian lead after a few years. Not saying I am proud of mother Russia in this case, just an observation.

gmuslera 7y ago

The bigger problem are not the right matches, but the wrong ones, specially if they are very similar. This should affect far more people than just ex-porn actresses.

keiru 7y ago
I'm gladly surprised that "lookalike revenge porn" isn't already a thing (that I know of)
nkurz 7y ago
While false-positives are definitely a problem, why do you think they are a bigger problem? Do you feel the participants in pornography are "fair game" but the others are innocent? In some ways, the current level of inaccuracy could be considered an advantage, because it makes it more likely that there will be resistance. A 100% accurate system strikes me as more dangerous, as it's less likely for politicians or lawmakers to stand up for the victims.
- keiru 7y ago
  Despite agreeing with your latter points, there's a reason why shrapnel damage is comparably serious. Although most people who did some porn are most likely not proffesionals, most porn (by volume) is done by people who might even consider your finding part of their CV. So going by sheer numbers alone, there might be so much more cases of false positives. Now, even if it becomes terribly obvious how inaccurate it is, I don't think that matters much when it comes to weaponising it, because people are easily fooled or don't care. As long as you kind find a vid of a girl that looks just like Clara from accounting, you can spread it as a false rumor. Or not even claim it's her; it's just as embarrassing. And that's even assuming you could tell them appart, because the seed of doubt extends the problem to people who didn't even do porn. For comparison think of deepfakes. Everybody knows it's not actually Emma Watson, but I bet she isn't particularly happy about it.

kabwj 7y ago

Why should pornography actors not have responsibilities for what they do? I don’t agree with this part where people who 1) put their faces in pornography and 2) put their faces in social media should not expect the two things to be correlated. Especially since the technology has already existed for some time and it cannot be stopped. Are we looking for regulation here? Is that exactly what we want, going back to cryptography export laws?

mannykannot 7y ago
The same principle would, of course, apply equally to this anonymous programmer.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Youcandothis 7y ago
> Why should pornography actors not have responsibilities for what they do? They should have a right for privacy.
- hurryskurry 7y ago
  How is the right to privacy being violated though? Imagine you were a stripper or porn actress, your right to privacy wouldn't preclude someone recognizing you at the strip club or video. Or suppose you went to the strip club or watched a video and then also happened to be on Facebook and saw the profile of someone you saw stripping at a strip club or in the video, matching the face and name in your head. How is the slow case different fundamentally from the case where programming is used and throughput and speed is much higher and faster? I mean would it be illegal for someone to just start going through Facebook profiles by hand trying to find an actress they just saw?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - 7y ago

bitL 7y ago

Bypassing the stupid issue of harassing actresses by likely teenagers, isn't a husband-to-be right to know about the past of his fiancee? Is the moral right of not being outed outweighing the moral right of not being deceived in a very important matter? Where is the line?

jonnycomputer 7y ago
What right of the husband-to-be are you talking about? Is failing to tell someone something the same thing as deception? Is this supposed right symmetric? Does bride-to-be have the right to know if the husband participated in porn video?
- bitL 7y ago
  > Is failing to tell someone something the same thing as deception? Yes, absolutely. Imagine you are the only person that doesn't know your fiance was in porn and you committed to her without knowing that. > Is this supposed right symmetric? Does bride-to-be have the right to know if the husband participated in porn video? Of course. Even though social stigma for males is lower, it has a devastating impact on their business relationships.
  - jonnycomputer 7y ago
    If you are the only one who doesn't know your fiance was in porn, then you are a fool or have no friends.
  - jonnycomputer 7y ago
    You still haven't actually answered the question of what "right" there is supposed to be. If a person is afraid that their fiance might have done porn in the past, or if they care so damn much, they should just ask the person.
    - bitL 7y ago
      If people were honest to each other all the time, we wouldn't need laws. Let's be generous and assume your question is just naive - could you ever envision a situation where an innocent husband-to-be (e.g. a nice, do-no-harm person and with reasonable means) is taken advantage of by a clever woman (with what is perceivably considered shady past in the given era) for her own material benefit? Do you think this never happens (hint: belletry is full of such situations and I'd recommend you to investigate common causes of suicide)? Doesn't husband-to-be have a justified interest in protecting his life, reputation, possessions from the baggage the unvetted fiancee brings? Do you think the fiancee wouldn't lie as much as possible in order to protect her planned future? If you truly are just naive, please think about the points I mentioned; if not, there is no point to discuss, as your mind is set in stone anyway.

hurryskurry 7y ago

If the videos are published, and the social media profiles public, how can it be illegal to match the two? Supposedly if they show their face they already accept the danger of being recognized, unless the video was published illegally. That said, why would someone, once someone was identified, just go about harassing them and telling all their friends they do porn? Like who does that?

jddj 7y ago
The internet has enabled some people to deploy complex systems into New York datacenters from a beach in Thailand in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately, it's also enabled a selection of less socially aware and/or socially responsible people to bypass the natural limits and filters that society had in place, to effectively cause suffering on a fairly broad scale. Harrassing somebody on the other side of the world from the safe anonymity of your bedroom was once logistically very difficult, as was reaching significant numbers of people with a wildly malicious idea if you couldn't first find people in your immediate (physical) social circle and community to vouch for you/it. Now, we have entire online communities which have embraced this new normal and provided these folk with the tools and an audience.
DougN7 7y ago
My guess is there are many that did porn when they were younger (and foolish?) but have since moved on with life and might want to forget that episode or their life. So having it resurface 10 years later would be very uncomfortable.