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Show HN: Loti – Remove revenge porn using facial recognition on adult sites
- siddiquezamann 4y agoaffordable and much better than other sites. Good experience.
- ElvinQD 4y agoThis my idea
- lja 4y agoHi I'm Luke, co-founder. People are warned that an image lives on the internet forever, this has been especially true for images that are not consensually taken or shared. We’re fixing that. We created Loti (https://goloti.com https://goloti.com), a service that uses facial recognition to help users search, find, and reclaim non-consensual intimate images and videos using a streamlined DMCA process we facilitate in our software. Over 10 million people are victims of non-consensual image sharing in the United States alone. Those are just the people that were even aware that their images were being shared; research shows that up to 30% of victims were hacked or victims of hidden cameras and are unaware. Our goal is to bring peace of mind that your private images stay private.
- hirak 4y agoHi, I am Hirak. I am a co-founder of Loti. Loti uses state of the art facial recognition algorithm built with proprietary models. It takes into consideration a dozen facial characteristics in more than 1 angles to find matches from a collection of more than 50 million data sets. We keep adding millions of new data every month to make sure we don't miss out any privacy breach of your photo.
- braingenious 4y agoHow did you arrive at the number of over 2.6 Billion victims of revenge porn? 33% of people seems like an incredible number.
- lja 4y agoHere's the quick read: https://www.fastcompany.com/90467411/shocking-study-finds-1-in-3-are-victims-of-revenge-porn-or-image-based-sexual-abuse https://www.fastcompany.com/90467411/shocking-study-finds-1-... Here's the real study: https://www.naag.org/attorney-general-journal/an-update-on-the-legal-landscape-of-revenge-porn/ https://www.naag.org/attorney-general-journal/an-update-on-t... Also, I don't think these numbers could be extrapolated to every country/region/culture on earth but they do seem to hold for european and english speaking markets.
- braingenious 4y agoSo you work for this company and your opinion that it’s 33% of english-speaking and european people? Napkin math puts the number of victims at ~400 million (population of europe + north america/3), maybe double that if you charitably count all of Africa being “english speaking”.
- lja 4y agoAny issues you have, you should read the study listed above. Gather what you want from it, believe what makes sense to you. It doesn’t matter to our mission. EDIT: regarding our marketing, I’ve cited our source.
- braingenious 4y agoYour website says “33% of people” Do you think it’s useful to state that given your own admission that it’s likely much lower?
- dr_kiszonka 4y agoI hope this service succeeds but that particular claim, especially in the light of the articles you shared, makes you seem untrustworthy.
- lja 4y ago
- braingenious 4y agoSeparate question: We’ve established that your website’s claim that there are 2.6 billion victims of revenge porn isn’t shared by people that work at Loti and it’s more likely ~400 million. Given that fact, if you were able to get 1% of those people to subscribe (4 million) at $8/mo, you would be taking in $32,000,000 per month ($384,000,000 per year). Would you not be the most profitable entity in the business of revenge porn?
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoWhy should it be a "subscription"? Its not like your content once id'd and removed can't be uploaded again so why would there be recurring fees?
- esyir 4y agoBecause that totally works. Look at youtube and the phenomenal work done there to get the same contentID'd video on via transforms.
- braingenious 4y ago>Why should it be a "subscription"? I genuinely have no idea, but that’s how they’ve decided to price this. For $8 you don’t even get takedowns or search results according to the pricing page. As far as I can tell you give them $8 per month in exchange for a monthly email saying “We ran a search.”? This is quite a bizarre company.
- cookiengineer 4y agoPlot twist: they're the ones reuploading the taken down materials. It's a money making machine! /s
- schroeding 4y agoHow high is the recall and the precision of your facial recognition ML model? :)
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago> Submit clear detailed pictures of your face in order to find porn of yourself. Do you think that is a good idea?
- lja 4y agoWould love clarity, what do you mean? That is the whole point of the service. If you don't submit a clear picture of yourself, there isn't any way for us to search.
- shubb 4y agoI guess the concern is that you are going to link an anonymous pornographic video to a real identity you have confirmed with ID. Clearly a big security risk there that needs to be handled carefully. For instance, if your alert email contains a link to the video, a bad actor who also had access to that email account now potentially had a blackmail opportunity. I am sure you handle all this carefully but you have to admit it is fraught.
- lja 4y agoWe are very careful with all outbound emails. We built an email system inside of our app to offer a second level of protection from adult sites.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y agoYou are making a great database. Ripe for governments, spies, stalkers, and trolls. Being as paranoid as I am I wonder which I assume this falls into.
- lja 4y agoYou’re not crazy, all those risks exist. Right now, we are weighing the good of getting this content off the internet versus the theoretical bad our own system being misused.
- KomoD 4y agoI feel like this can be easily misused
- thot_experiment 4y agoI'm not sure what (1) alert per month means, but I definitely think that $8/mo to find porn with your preferred facial characteristics based on some uploaded images seems like a more viable business model. I'm certain there are people who would pay to have a digest of pron with lookalikes of their favorite actresses/whatever mailed to them regularly.
- lja 4y ago1 alert a month means that we'll automatically scan our database once a month and send you an email. It's more of an insurance policy to make sure we didn't find anything for you that month.
- lja 4y agoWe have protections in place to prevent misuse but we are aware that prevention will be a large hill for us to climb and we're working on it.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoHow do you confirm the identity of your customer to ensure your DMCA takedown notices are legitimate? How do you programmatically discern between non-consensual adult images being shared against the subject's wishes versus images where they are somewhere public, don't own the copyright to the photo, but the law does not require the copyright holder remove or take down the image? Cool idea, might need to pivot, regardless an interesting space to be in in these times. EDIT: Appreciate the replies!
- hirak 4y agoWe have an error-proof system in place that follows specific protocols and instructions provided by each individual host websites. This helps us filter out 90% non-legitimate takedown notices.
- abrookewood 4y ago"We have an error-proof system" ... yeah, no you don't. Especially if you're using ML.
- lja 4y agoConfirmation is lower right now as we are working to get people into the app, a DMV/government license before people know who we are may be a too big of a pill to swallow for a starting company. We do have ML models running in the background to detect abuse and the accounts are flagged to management to reach out to those customers. I don't want to go through all the cat-and-mouse strategies we may have to avoid people gaming them. If someone has taken pictures for a company and given their model release for that image and its made its way to an adult site, then the individual should not initiate a DMCA. This is something we make our customers aware of before they DMCA content. Also, we know from first hand experience that site operators are quick to deny a DMCA if they do own rights for it. We've talked to them about this very situation.
- cvalka 4y agoWhy is the DMCA even relevant here? Who's the copyright holder?
- thot_experiment 4y agoI bet y'all would make a lot more money charging $8/mo to find porn with the exact facial characteristic someone is looking for. Don't get me wrong, revenge porn is bad, but charging people money to take it down seems, well I guess better than nothing but let's hope a nonprofit starts maintaining a database like this and completely eliminates any market this site may capture. Also abusing the DMCA for censorship, even in pursuit of a noble cause is harmful to society, though maybe not more harmful than revenge porn? I'm really curious how our culture will continue to reckon with the ideas that a) There are intimate images extant of many people. Many will become most. b) AI powered face swapping and image generation will make arbitrary porn trivial on home-gamer GPUs in a few years.
- lja 4y agoThe idea of charging $8/mo for someone to look at anyone's photos online is pretty far off brand for us. We're really looking to help people find just their own photos. I do agree the market would be larger but that's not something we're interested in doing. That breaks ethical barriers for us. We have to charge money to cover our expenses, most people don't realize how expensive GPU's are and that's the only way to do this cost effectively at scale. Even a non-profit would incur enormous expenses because there is just no way to do this cheap. There is no abuse of the DMCA process here. Customers are asked to sign an affidavit and we don't allow them to DMCA outside of their facial profiles.
- thot_experiment 4y agoI just don't feel like your motives can possibly be aligned with victims if you're trying to make money off victims. RE: DMCA abuse, it's probably within the letter of the law, the law itself is broken. Bonus question: How does this all deal with twins? What's the miss rate on facial recognition anyway?
- lja 4y agoWe're partnered with RAINN and other sexual abuse agencies to give victims in extreme situations free access to our site. Our alignment isn't perfect but we are working to be a useful tool at a low cost. Some things provide a social good but also have expenses, this happens to be one of them. Doctors charge patients, lawyers charge their clients and we aren't anywhere near those margins. EDIT: Twins are still a weak spot for us, but we have a plan to build a model that can tell two twins apart.
- Centigonal 4y agoI think this idea has potential, but HN might be far off from your target audience.
- lja 4y agoThanks! I've been a member for a decade and just wanted to share what I'm working on in data science.
- gardenhedge 4y agoHopefully I never have to use this for me but I am glad it exists
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoAnd here we are, defensive AI to aggressive/offensive/assault AI. So the cloud providers will: - make bank from the social networks hosting your content/likeness - make bank from the offensive/exploitation AIs trying to exploit your content/likeness for gain - make bank from the detection/defensive AIs looking for exploits of your content/likeness The laws will never catch up.
- SRO1 4y agoethical. It is obvious to do on a positive way by far.
- fahad763 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dnhk21 4y agorecognition & this is good for everyone.
- kmusafir 4y ago[dead]
- anwar343 4y ago[dead]
- harunbpltl 4y ago[dead]
- abubaqar112 4y ago[dead]
- mudoo786 4y ago[dead]
- rabiul660660 4y agoGood experience.
- hanzla786 4y ago[dead]
- nikau 4y ago> facial recognition on adult sites phrasing
- IYasha 4y agoThe fact that someone is processing so much biometrical data makes me feel very uneasy. I know governments and 3-letter agencies do this for a long time, but still. Not exactly sure what revenge porn is, but I think I get the idea.
- deathclassic 4y agoAre you fucking stupid? You literally just built a porn reverse image search tool. Think about it, all you need is a screen shot of a single frame of porn and you can find links to other vids with that person. This is a godsend for coomers. Not to mention, the abuse potential of something like this is insane. Now anyone can just use a girls facebook profile or linkedin pic to find nudes - perfect for fapping or for blackmail. Copyright isn't gonna stop offiline copies from being taken, and the fact that most NCII out there exists of a subject that is unaware of said content being published, hence the people that need your tool the most proabably won't know it exists - until its too late. It's so funny how you're trying to pass of this tool as "socially beneficial" when all it's gonna do is make the problem worse. The internet and digital cameras being available to everyone was a mistake, when I come to power I'm just outright banning any transmission or storage of any photos of naked human bodies with the exception of medical reference pics. Or I'll just ban cellphones and home computers from civillian use entirely. EDIT: I probably wouldn't ban the internet or home computers, but I'd at least completely ban porn, and use a tool like OPs to enforce such a ban with extreme prejudice. Anyone hosting or running a site with such content would face years of hard labor
- dismantlethesun 4y agoThere are many other sites like this built to facilitate the removal of revenge porn and sending DMCA requests to sites who use the material of amateur and professional performers. It’s good for you to shine a light on the problematics aspects of this tech but this is a decades old industry so I think you are being a bit harsh by treating the poster as if they are creating a new problem.
- deathclassic 4y agoOP did create a tool that could easily be used for abuse and blackmail. Of course, it could also be used to solve the problem if the government just grew a pair and banned porn outright and punished anyone caught hosting or producing it harshly.