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…
Google has always allowed people to request certain content, like a malicious website or copies of your contact information, to be removed from search results. The company already had a policy for removing private images or videos, but now it’s taking fake pornographic content more seriously. Google now has a support page dedicated to removing “involuntary fake pornography,” with instructions that people can follow to report said content. For a request to be accepted, the person reporting the content has to be the person depicted in the fake imagery. The company notes that this process only removes the requested content from Google search results, not from the sites actually hosting it. This updated policy is likely in response to the growing popularity of ‘deepfakes’ - sexual videos and images where someone’s face is substituted for another person’s (usually a celebrity). As the name might suggest, deepfakes are generated using…
New York’s revenge-porn bill died early Thursday morning after the Senate adjourned for the year and took no action in the wake of an 11th-hour campaign by Google against the legislation. The proposal — which has languished in Albany since its introduction in 2013 and was recently taken up again after a Post exposé — would have made nonconsensual dissemination of sexually explicit images a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. It would have also helped victims sue Web hosts to remove the offending images. But Google mounted a late effort against the bill, with the Internet behemoth opposed to any government oversight over how it regulates content. Attorney Carrie Goldberg, who’d been leading lobbying efforts for the bill, was livid that senators went home without even taking a vote, effectively killing the legislation until next year. The only long-shot chance for the bill is if…
Photo: Getty The New York state Senate failed to vote on a revenge porn bill on Wednesday, and those advocating for the legislation blame Google and a tech lobbyist group for pressuring lawmakers to abandon it in the final hour. The bill, if passed, would have criminalized the non-consensual distribution of intimate photos in the state, which is one of the last remaining holdout states to make revenge porn illegal. “In New York state we have laws that protect financial information, medical information, corporate secrets,” victims’ rights attorney Carrie Goldberg told Gizmodo in an email. “Hell, it’s technically illegal to record at a Beyoncé concert and post that to the Internet, but yet there is no protection when it comes to sexual privacy.” On Tuesday, the New York Assembly unanimously approved the bill. Wednesday was the last day for the Senate to vote before the end of the legislative…
A New York state bill that would outlaw ‘revenge porn’ has been shelved until next year, after a late lobbying effort by tech giant Google succeeded in blocking a vote in the state Senate. The bill, which existed in legal limbo since 2013, was pushed through the State Assembly after a New York Post article last year highlighted the problem. It would have made the distribution of sexual images without the consent of the person shown punishable by up to a year in jail, and it would have helped victims sue web hosts to remove the images. Governor Andrew Cuomo had vowed to sign the bill once it passed the Senate and made its way to his desk. However, after a last-minute lobbying campaign by The Internet Association, working on behalf of Google, senators adjourned for the year without a vote, putting the bill on ice once again until…
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…
This week, Google quietly dropped its defining motto, “don’t be evil.” The move comes as Google recently entered into a deal with the Pentagon to develop better artificial intelligence for facial recognition in its killer drone program. That Google is using its massive research capacity for military applications should make citizens and legislators around the world shudder. We have come a very long way from those heady days of the early digital revolution when edgy startup companies like Google sold us a vision of a democratic digital commons, where people around the globe were brought together by access to knowledge and ease of communication and connectivity. Google even talked about creating the greatest library the world had ever known. What we didn’t know was that library was our own personal lives — and the beneficiaries were Google’s investors, not the general public. Nobody paid much attention to how Google…
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