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

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

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

If you are already a criminal, you aren't worried about the lack of a permit that much. Especially when you are a cybercriminal separated from your server by multiple cryptocurrency tumblers. Forward intelligence teams already record the faces of people taking part in peaceful and legal protests. You can bet your ass they cross-ref the feed with their Linkedin and Facebook data dumps. The same tech is now becoming av…

This is something so many people do not seem to understand: if you ban something, you only prevent law abiding citizens from using it, it won't stop the law breakers who were going to use it regardless of what the law says. There are people who DDOS video game servers in the US as to not lose the game, even though it's a felony.

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

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I think that probably these things could even get completely prevented if people acted more consciously. It starts with DNS providers and hosters who should be aware of what people are doing with their services and shut them down if they aren't ethically good. Probably Telcos and especially also CDNs should do the same. I don't talk about any packet inspection. But sometimes it's obvious what people are up to. Basica…

That could be dangerous, though, as social mores change and the things which are "ethically good" become different. I'm already not a big fan of "deplatforming", and this seems like basically the same thing.

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

#33

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.

I'm gladly surprised that "lookalike revenge porn" isn't already a thing (that I know of)

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

#34

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.

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.

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

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> 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…

A while ago I suggested that engineers could have an ethics code just like lawyers or doctors and the opinion wasn’t very popular (although with no explicitly stated reason). I still don’t see a reason not to have one. If your company is selling your code and software to abusive states and it’s used to persecute journalists (for example) continuing to do that work there is no different than any unethical work from a doctor or lawyer. And software developers have a huge impact on our life these days With their work. It’s reasonable to hold them to higher standards than in the past.

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

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

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??

Laws are often difficult to enforce, but that is not a reason to not have the laws.

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

#37
post #30

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 cryp…

The same principle would, of course, apply equally to this anonymous programmer.

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

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. T…

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.

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

#39

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?

In France, we have something called "droit à l'image". It means that if you can't appear on a picture without your authorization, with a few exceptions.

If you give an authorization, it has to be for a specific purpose and not generalized. So just because you gave an authorization to appear in a movie doesn’t mean you gave an authorization for other purposes, such as face matching. Same thing for social media.

There are also copyright issues. If France, you always own copyright (droit d'auteur), you may transfer the exploitation rights but the work is still yours. It means you still retain some level of control, in particular regarding decency.

France is just one European country but that's to show that there are limits to what you can do, even with publicly available data.

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

#40
post #30

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 cryp…

The same principle would, of course, apply equally to this anonymous programmer.

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