Live data from Hacker News

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

technologyreview.com

71–80 of 91 posts

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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should pornography actors not have responsibilities for what they do? They should have a right for privacy.

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…

What if we're not talking about strippers or porn actresses. What if we're talking about some random person who let a partner take photos/videos of them, in confidence and in private?

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should pornography actors not have responsibilities for what they do? They should have a right for privacy.

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…

The right of privacy is violated if someone that wanted to stay anonomous is defamed. Doing searched automatically is also very different from doing it manually. But even if it's done manually, defaming someone still goes against their right to privacy.

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

#73

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?

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.

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

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The point of a law isn't the law in its own right, it's to solve a problem. And an unenforceable law isn't actually solving anything.

There's a difference in being difficult to enforce and impossible to enforce. Laws like we are discussing here are enforceable enough.

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

#75

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?

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.

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

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has everything to do with the GDPR because the GDPR outlines the conditions you need to meet to process data, simply put actually gathering the data and using this tool is not legal within the EU. >If I simply sit in the cafe watching someone continuously near me, I am collecting data, and nobody can do anything about it. But the tool is doing more than that as it's also using data gathered from crawling social…

> the right to opt out and the right to erasure of data among others. Algorythm doesn't have to collect any data on you besides your image which is not considered private data given that you need to carry one. It can have single image and compare it to the porn collection without storing any results anywhere, but just returning 'XXX was a porn star in YYY'. Tool can also create opt out mechanism which would have to b…

>Algorythm doesn't have to collect any data on you besides your image which is not considered private data given that you need to carry one.

The GDPR doesn't care about 'private' data (for the most part) as it only cares about personal data, and faces absolutely are considered personal data under article 4 point 14. Faces are even in a special category of data which you are prohibited from processing at all unless some conditions are met, although article 9 point 2e allows processing such data if they have been 'manifestly made public'. The GDPR doesn't define what 'manifestly made public' means but the Scottish Parliament[0] suggests that it could mean images purposely uploaded to social media and made public, but note that just because you are not prohibited from processing such images does not mean you have a lawful basis for processing that data in the first place.

>It can have single image and compare it to the porn collection without storing any results anywhere, but just returning 'XXX was a porn star in YYY'.

>Implementation detail. This can be totally avoided. Tool can accept picture and return the result.

This is an implementation detail that I had not considered. The original tool and article talks about crawling both porn sites as well as social media and both are fraught with legal issues, not every video or image on porn sites is going to be legal in the first place (revenge porn, stolen images) never mind the copyright issues involved, and crawling social media for this information is simply not acceptable under the GDPR.

>Tool can also create opt out mechanism

Such a tool would almost certainly need to be opt in from the data subject, article 6 makes this clear, you need specific consent from the data subject or some other conditionals which aren't applicable here. Best case scenario if you want to operate such a tool in Europe is that you argue (in court, mind) that you have a legitimate interest to run such a tool which does not override the fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject, which does not seem like it would go in your favour at all.

[0] Page 6: https://www.parliament.scot/S5ChamberOffice/2018_06_01_Motio...

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the right to opt out and the right to erasure of data among others. Algorythm doesn't have to collect any data on you besides your image which is not considered private data given that you need to carry one. It can have single image and compare it to the porn collection without storing any results anywhere, but just returning 'XXX was a porn star in YYY'. Tool can also create opt out mechanism which would have to b…

>Algorythm doesn't have to collect any data on you besides your image which is not considered private data given that you need to carry one. The GDPR doesn't care about 'private' data (for the most part) as it only cares about personal data, and faces absolutely are considered personal data under article 4 point 14. Faces are even in a special category of data which you are prohibited from processing at all unless so…

Great comments

Consider however the variant I proposed (picture 2 result). Would that be penalty according to GDPR and if photo is already public and not used for personal identification ?

Perhaps it could be said that the any algorithm that makes person identifiable is problematic. However, random photo of you doesn't identify you AFAIK and porn star names are also made up, so you are connecting 2 non-identifying things and the end result most also be non-id ?

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has everything to do with the GDPR because the GDPR outlines the conditions you need to meet to process data, simply put actually gathering the data and using this tool is not legal within the EU. >If I simply sit in the cafe watching someone continuously near me, I am collecting data, and nobody can do anything about it. But the tool is doing more than that as it's also using data gathered from crawling social…

Does GDPR applies to third party users of a website? Does it cover use of public data by other visitors or just use of private data by the site owner?

This is a bit of a vague question, but most importantly the GDPR doesn't make a distinction between public/private data except in some niche contexts, the GDPR is more concerned about personal data which can be anything that can identify a natural person, e.g., names, email addresses, location data, IP addresses (in some circumstances, not all), etc. The GDPR mainly concerns processors and controllers of data where a processor or processing of data can include collecting that data, so in this context can mean third parties to a website, for example a company crawling social media for instance would have to follow the GDPR and have a lawful basis for collecting (processing) that data.

The GDPR also generally applies to everybody (within the EU or serving EU customers) except 'a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity', it's important to note that non-profits still have to comply with the GDPR. Generally there's a lot of legal ways to process data as a legitimate business, the law is mostly concerned with giving individuals a means to opt out or to give them some rights with regards to their data, like the 'right to be forgotten' or the right to access the data a company may have on them.

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

#79

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 an…

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…

You mean, you want to prevent people from comparing public images against public videos on the public internet, by requiring them to obtain licensing?

This approach will just entrench FAANG even more and squeeze out SMBs even more.

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

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Algorythm doesn't have to collect any data on you besides your image which is not considered private data given that you need to carry one. The GDPR doesn't care about 'private' data (for the most part) as it only cares about personal data, and faces absolutely are considered personal data under article 4 point 14. Faces are even in a special category of data which you are prohibited from processing at all unless so…

Great comments Consider however the variant I proposed (picture 2 result). Would that be penalty according to GDPR and if photo is already public and not used for personal identification ? Perhaps it could be said that the any algorithm that makes person identifiable is problematic. However, random photo of you doesn't identify you AFAIK and porn star names are also made up, so you are connecting 2 non-identifying th…

>Consider however the variant I proposed (picture 2 result). Would that be penalty according to GDPR and if photo is already public and not used for personal identification ?

>However, random photo of you doesn't identify you AFAIK and porn star names are also made up, so you are connecting 2 non-identifying things and the end result most also be non-id ?

I'd say this would still be against the GDPR. The porn image (assuming a professional production and not revenge porn/stolen images) and an image from social media would both be public images of course, but under the GDPR you still need a lawful basis for processing data as defined by article 6 [0], one such basis for this is that the data subject concerned (i.e., the person in the photo being uploaded) gives specific consent for this purpose. The only way I can see such a site being legal is if you're providing a service to allow people to upload their own images to see if porn of them is being uploaded without consent, however you would need to ensure that the person in the image is the one consenting to that use as you would be liable if other people were uploading those images. It may also be legal to run such a tool for purely personal reasons as the GDPR does not apply to personal activities [1], but it would be illegal to make this available to other people and you would still have other legal issues with such a tool (like copyright).

[0] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-2-gdpr/

Post reply on HN