ST.LOUIS, MO- Missouri lawmakers unanimously approved a bill banning Revenge Porn. The proposal would make distributing a sexual image of someone without their consent a felony.
It also outlaws threatening to make the image public in order to prevent someone from doing something or to gain something of value.
The proposal was in the works long before Governor Eric Greitens was charged with a felony for allegedly taking a partially nude photo of his ex-mistress.
A Northern Irish woman wants the company to search its entire network An alleged victim of revenge porn is mounting a high court attempt in Belfast to compel Facebook to search for explicit photographs of her. The tech and publishing company has already deleted “highly sexualised” images of the Northern Irish woman, which are said to have been sent to 25 users. Her lawyers now want those accounts to be checked to establish whether the pictures were forwarded. The woman, who cannot be identified, claims that her former partner used Facebook’s private messaging service to share the photographs after they broke up. Although she has ended her action against her ex-boyfriend, she is continuing to sue Facebook for breach of privacy and alleged failures in its system. She has said that her independence and dignity were undermined…
(istockphoto) After years of stalled efforts at the state level, New York City is now pursing its own legislation to criminalize “revenge porn”—the act of sharing explicit photos of a person with the “intention to cause economic, emotional or physical harm.” Under the new bill, which is expected to get a committee vote in the council next month, sleazy offenders who share “intimate images” without their subject’s consent will face one year in jail and a fine of $1,000. Victims may also pursue civil penalties—including “compensatory and punitive damages”—in the absence of a criminal conviction. The bill was first introduced by Queens Councilman Rory Lancman last September, and has since gained the support of both Mayor de Blasio and the NYPD. “It is critically important for the laws in New York City to catch up with our technology to provide protections for New Yorkers from such abuse,” Lancman…
The bill would not only have made the nonconsensual dissemination of sexually explicit images a misdemeanor, but it would have also helped victims sue web platforms for failing to remove the offending images. It’s that last part that appears to have lured Google and web-hosting sites into the fray. According to the New York Post, the Internet Association—the self-proclaimed “voice of the internet economy” and a lobbying group that works on behalf of Google, Amazon, and many other tech giants—lobbied hard against the bill. What the Post calls its “11th hour campaign” led the state Senate to take no action on the bill before leaving for summer recess, effectively killing the legislation until next year. The bill had already passed the Assembly, and New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, had pledged to sign it, which is why advocates for its passing are understandably frustrated by the loss. “Big Tech, especially Google,…
If ever there was a no-brainer appropriate for the skill level of the empty noggins in Albany, it was the bill to ban revenge porn. If someone posts online a nude picture of you without your consent for the world to dissect and ridicule and beat their chests over, it obviously ought to be a criminal offense in this state. Yet a bill proposing to make the posting of revenge porn a misdemeanor with a penalty of up to a year in prison has been languishing in Albany since 2013. This month, the legislators again went home for the summer without acting on it. Guess who’s behind this nauseating course of nonaction? Google. That’s right, the Internet’s great champion of feminism — hey, don’t they make an effort to be inclusive when picking the Google Doodle every day? — is doing little to stop the revolting daily public humiliation…
A Mobile man is being charged under Alabama’s new revenge porn law after he allegedly posted naked pictures of his ex-girlfriend on social media. Bryndon Bess, 21, is accused of posting the pictures on social media app Snapchat and refused to stop until the victim spoke to him, according to the Mobile County Sheriff’s Department. The new law, formally known as Distributing Private Images, went into effect one year ago and carries up to a year in jail. Source link
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,…
Speaking out anonymously through the youth engagement tool U-Report, almost three-quarters of young people also said social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, are the most common place for online bullying. “Connected classrooms mean school no longer ends once a student leaves class, and, unfortunately, neither does schoolyard bullying”, said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore. “Improving young people’s education experience means accounting for the environment they encounter online as well as offline.” Via SMS and instant messaging, young people were asked a series of questions about their experiences of online bullying and violence, including who they thought should be trying to end it. Some 32 per cent of those polled believed governments should end cyberbullying, 31 per cent put the onus on young people themselves to stop the harassment and 29 per cent cited internet companies as bearing the chief responsibility. “One of the key messages that we can clearly see from…
For years, Anon-IB, the internet’s most notorious epicenter of revenge porn, thrived as users posted nude photos and videos of women without their consent. They published these images under the assumption that they were anonymous—their usernames were “Anonymous” followed by a string of letters. A new heatmap visualization using IP adresses of Anon-IB users highlights that people who share revenge porn on the forum weren’t as anonymous as they may have thought. In March, cybercrime teams from the Dutch police seized the Anon-IB forum as part of an investigation. Einar Otto Stangvik, a Norwegian security analyst, turned the IP address data—strings of numbers that reveal the location of a computer connected to the internet—that he collected before the seizure, into a heat map of where people were posting from. Stangvik shared much of the data, which spans from February 2015 to January 2018, with The Daily Beast in January. Across…
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….
Michael Weigel’s former partner woke up last December to a stunning email from her ex. “You will never live in peace. You will live in shame and embarrassment for the rest of your life,” the email said, according to the excerpt the woman read in Ramsey County District Court on Tuesday. Ramsey County sheriff’s office Michael Weigel, 39 It went on to detail how Weigel had plastered naked pictures of her that the two took while they were still a couple on her new boyfriend’s Facebook page. The photos were attached in the email. “I wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear,” the woman recounted for the court. She spent weeks crying and panicking as she tried to navigate Facebook’s process for getting the photos removed. She had to show the images to police officers so that criminal charges could be pursued. She worried the public exposure might cost…
A post-graduate researcher warns revenge porn offenders could be slipping through through the cracks. Tess Upperton, who wrote her honours dissertation on criminalising revenge porn, is calling for new legislation to specifically target the increasing problem. Revenge porn is the common term for the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, which currently falls under the Harmful Digital Communications Act. Charges and convictions under the Harmful Digital Communications Act have more than doubled each year since it was introduced in July 2015. Netsafe CEO Martin Cocker, the Approved Agency for the Act, said it was reasonable to expect revenge porn court cases to continue increasing. Ms Upperton said there’s been “a bit of complacency” since the Harmful Digital Communications Act was passed in 2015. “The law here might start looking a little bit dated and not quite up to scratch in terms of how we view and treat victims.” Ms Upperton…
At Primus Private School, we interviewed students to find out how they are being cyber bullied and how they felt about it Dubai: Shaikh Zayed believed that it is important to respect everyone equally. Throughout his life, Shaikh Zayed treated people with utmost respect regardless of status or gender. Students should also treat each other with respect. This will surely decrease the rate of cyber bullying. Anyone who is cyber bullied should first tell an adult who will help him or her solve the issue. A reason for bullying is that students do not respect each other and others’ culture. Having interviewed some students, we have come to the conclusion that cyber bullying is a problem quite widespread. Have you ever been cyber bullied? How did you react? Yes, I have been cyber bullied. I use the Facebook and Instagram social networking sites. I had posted a photo in…
A New Richmond man has entered a plea in a revenge porn case. Wyoming County Prosecutor Mike Cochrane said it is the first case in the county under the new statute, which became law last year. Timothy McNulty, 47, pleaded no contest early last week. According to Cochrane, McNulty sent intimate photos of an ex-girlfriend to another person. A first offense is a misdemeanor, Cochrane reported. A second offense is a felony. A first offense carries penalties of a fine of no less than $1,000 and no more than $5,000. There can also be jail time of up to a year. While referred to as “revenge porn,” the prosecutor said the statute is actually called “non-consensual disclosure of private, intimate images.” McNulty was charged in November 2017. Lt. Will Hall of the Wyoming County Sheriff’s Department was the investigating officer. Source link
By Express News Service KOCHI: The Kochi city police on Sunday arrested a person on charges of posting derogatory comments against Hanan Hamid, the college student who became a talking point after news reports on her selling fish became viral on social media. Also Read: Wayanad man taken into custody for cyberbullying Hanan Hamid; let off after interrogation According to the police, Viswanathan aka Viswan Cherai, 42, a native of Guruvayur, was arrested by the Palarivattom police for posting abusive comments under the video posted by Nooruddin Shaik, a native of Wayanad. Earlier, the police had taken Nooruddin into custody, but later released him after interrogation. Officers said this is the first arrest in connection with the incident and more persons are likely to be arrested. Nooruddin Shaik was released after the police found that he had not posted any abusive comments against Hanan. However, the police collected statements from him…
A group of local women who have given advice to Facebook, butted heads with Google and have helped thousands of victims of image abuse – more commonly known as revenge porn – are celebrating the first anniversary of their organization. Battling Against Demeaning and Abusive Selfie Sharing – BADASS – began a year ago after founder Katelyn Bowden of Youngstown discovered intimate images of her had been posted to the internet without her consent after an ex-boyfriend’s phone was stolen. With little protection in terms of state legislation, the police couldn’t offer Bowden much help. Frustrated, she and BeLinda Berry, a friend whose images also were stolen and shared on the internet, began the nonprofit BADASS to help victims of image abuse fight back. By their first year, the group was responsible for having more than 9,000 images removed from the internet and identified more than 1,500 people who…
