Getty Images Facebook, Twitter and Google aren’t prepared for deepfakes ahead of the US presidential election, a top Congressman said after the tech giants sent letters last week about how they deal with high-tech doctored videos and other kinds of media manipulation. The companies “have begun thinking seriously” about the challenges, said Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, but it’s their responsibility to prevent their platforms from being weaponized. “It’s clear they are far from ready to accomplish that,” Schiff said in a statement. Deepfakes are sophisticated video forgeries, created automatically by artificial intelligence, that can make people appear to be doing or saying things they never did. Though computer manipulation of video has existed for decades, artificial intelligence is making deepfakes and other so-called synthetic media more accessible and harder to detect. The companies — YouTube-owner Google, Facebook and Twitter — all responded in letters dated Wednesday to questions Schiff sent them…
Express News Service MANGALURU: When a Tulu film comedian got a friend request on Facebook from a pretty girl calling herself Ashwini, he readily accepted and soon fell victim to blackmail and extortion. A police complaint followed. The Mangaluru police traced the girl to Bengaluru. But, when they caught her after a chase and took her to the jurisdictional Bengaluru police station on Tuesday, they and the comedian who was present got the shock of their lives. Though the accused was dressed as a girl, the Bengaluru police who recognised ‘Ashwini’ told them it was a boy. ‘Ashwini’ alias Adithya (19), a first PU student, is a resident of Subedar Palya, Yeshwantpur. The police also nabbed his accomplice, Arun H S (27), who hails from Kanakapura, and a supervisor with a cab aggregator. Both were charged with blackmail and extortion. ‘Ashwini’ alias Adithya Uday M Nayak, ACP, Central Mangaluru, said they…
A Summit County man learned the hard way last month that you can’t always trust people you meet online. The 21-year-old had been communicating with someone he thought was a woman on Facebook when the person convinced him to send explicit photos of himself through the messenger app, according to the Summit County Sheriff’s Office. The person demanded money to not make the photos public, so the victim sent $100 through Western Union, a Sheriff’s Office report states. The person then requested an additional $1,000, but the victim refused to send it. The victim filed a report with the Sheriff’s Office on Sept. 26. Lt. Andrew Wright said reports of people attempting to extort others over social media are becoming increasingly common. “It’s so easy for people to disguise themselves and have ill intentions,” he said. “Before anyone chooses to engage in that type of risqué behavior, they really…
Psychologist Asia Eaton is helping Facebook in its fight against revenge porn. Eaton, other researchers, lawyers and victim advocates from around the world recently convened at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. to present the latest research and brainstorm solutions to help victims of online dating abuse, cyber harassment and non-consensual pornography or revenge porn. Non-consensual porn, or the distribution of sexually graphic images of individuals without their consent, is a form of sexual violence. According to Eaton, Facebook has become one of the main avenues for distribution of these images, so the network is taking initiative to reduce and prevent abuse. Psychologist Asia Eaton visited Facebook headquarters to share research on consequences of non-consensual pornography. “Facebook is trying to be proactive about protecting potential and actual victims of non-consensual porn on their platform,” Eaton said. “Unfortunately, a great number of cases of non-consensual porn have been perpetrated using…
A Williamsport woman charged with distribution of child pornography is accused of uploading explicit images from a minor’s cellphone onto the internet. Ashley Nicole Grove, 28, was charged this week by summons for an incident first reported by the victim on Jan. 2, according to the charging document filed by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in District Court. One of the charges was under Maryland’s revenge porn statute. The teenager told investigators that Grove posted the photos of her performing sexual acts on a male to Facebook, the document said. The victim said “she had several broken cell phones which she gave to” Grove, the document said. The victim told investigators that she gave a subscriber identification module (SIM) card to Grove, unaware that it contained images of her nude and having sex, the document said. The victim said Grove posted the images on her Facebook page on Dec….
Facebook is expanding its controversial anti-revenge porn program to the US, UK, and Canada — Quartz
Last November, Australian media reported that Facebook was experimenting with a novel idea to combat revenge porn on its platforms. In a pilot program done in cooperation with the government, users would do something that feels ill advised: upload a nude image to Facebook. The idea was that by doing so, Facebook could preempt that specific image from being uploaded to the platform by someone else in the future through technology that can help identify duplicates. The program sparked backlash among Facebook observers and internet users. One cybersecurity expert told Quartz at the time that it was a “horrible idea,” questioning the wisdom of giving such sensitive information to a third party—a sentiment hard to shake after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed just how unsafe user data was on Facebook. Despite the criticism, on May 22, Facebook announced that it was expanding the tests to the US, UK,…
Facebook is expanding its fight against revenge porn with a pilot program that asks users to send their naked photos so Facebook can block the photos before someone else shares them. Facebook’s been testing the system in Australia and is extending the trial to the U.S., Britain and Canada, BBC News reports. In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Facebook’s Global Head of Safety Antigone Davis said the company was updating its pilot program targeting the non-consensual sharing of images on the platform. Rather than having to report an image after it’s already been shared around Facebook (the company already has a system in place for reporting and removing those images), Facebook will let users upload an image before it’s been seen by others, CNET reports. Facebook users worried about intimate images being shared on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger can contact their relevant local organization and submit a form. Facebook’s Global Head of Safety…
The office of the Australian e-safety commissioner has confirmed that a planned pilot that would allow Facebook users to upload their nudes to the social media website to assist with the takedown of those nude photos from Facebook, will likely launch later this year. Late last year the e-safety commissioner announced the pilot where users fill out a form with the commissioner, send the photo via a one-time link provided to them, a Facebook employee reviews the image, hashes it (stores it in a “human-unreadable numerical fingerprint”) and then deletes the original photo. When someone attempts to upload the photo to Facebook after that, it is matched with the hash and blocked. This week Facebook announced it would expand the pilot to the UK, Canada, and the US. The Australian newspaper then reported on Friday that the pilot was “called off” in Australia by the e-safety commissioner “amid fears…
Facebook is ramping up its efforts to combat the spread of non-consensual “revenge porn” images across its main website, Instagram and Messenger, it confirmed this week. The move expands on a pilot scheme announced last year that asked any users who were concerned about the spread of intimate images to proactively upload them using the encrypted Messenger service, where photo-matching technology could prevent further sharing. The social network has stressed it does not store the images long term, but instead keeps their unique fingerprint, or “hash.” Initial tests rolled out to a small number of users in Australia last November. On Tuesday, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, shared more details about how the plan had evolved in recent months. Now, the website is working closely with safety, survivor and victim organizations across in Canada, the U.K. and U.S. to help stop private moments being shared online without permission. “It’s demeaning…
Facebook has publicly released its most complete community guidelines to date after many years keeping the specific rules its moderators used to govern the platform secret. The update tacked over 5000 more words onto the already unwieldy document, which now includes highly specific examples of banned or heavily regulated content. Is any of it at all surprising? Well, yes. Most platforms have rules that outline common-sense genres of content they’d rather not be liable for - harassment, hate speech, gore, child endangerment, etc. - and these are no different. But as a reflection of its size and global reach, Facebook’s guidelines include some of the most granular examples of what not to do online. Cannibalism is off limits. “Sexualized massages” are specifically barred. Staged animal fights won’t fly, and neither will videos of animals being processed for food. Images of buttocks or an anus are a no-go, “unless photoshopped…