Is there a solution against revenge porn? | Hacker News Reader

Is there a solution against revenge porn?

3 pointsItTabs8 comments

What are the current solutions in combating revenge porn? Revenge porn, think of it as porn without the user's consent; maybe they got hacked or from a malicious actor. Currently how it works is if a victim will request the media off a site, but it like cutting a head off a hydra since there are so many websites coming on and off. Is there a way to do it without really censoring the internet? Another problem is, as deep fakes are becoming super realistic that it will eventually become difficult to tell apart the fake pornography from real ones. As a non-technical person, I would love to hear your thoughts on how to tackle this problem?

In the year 1890 Samuel D. Warren, with future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, published "The Right to Privacy" in Harvard Law Review[1]. Among other things, they wrote, "Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that "what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops."

In the intervening 131 years the law has addressed this problem, but it is lagging behind the changes and problems brought by new technologies like digital imaging and the Internet. The solution, as it was in the late 19th and early 20th century, is for a legal framework to protect the victims.

Right now we're in the "You have zero privacy anyway, get over it"[2] era.

1 https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/courses/cs5436/warren-bran...

2 https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/

The guy would have a heart attack if he knew that we have some small flying devices that can record you in real time and send the video thousands of km away.

True, but in 1890 was less than 50 years old, and the kinds of small, instantaneous kinds of cameras that concerned Brandeis had only been readily available for a decade.

Ironically, most people had less real privacy, and fewer “rights” to privacy, in 1890 and at every point in the past than they do now, even though a lot of people live in virtual surveillance states today. There’s a difference between intrusions into your personal life when it comes to saving face (or saving a career or marriage or other relationship), and intrusions that just add your private details to a stream of billions of private details (Facebook, for example).

In 1890, and even when I was young several decades ago, finding out that someone you knew was carrying on an affair was a potentially career- and social life-ending situation should the secret get out. Now no one would care much about it.

> Ironically

It's not ironic. In 1890 your privacy couldn't be violated six ways from Sunday before you even finished breakfast. Your privacy was inviolate simply because it couldn't be compromised by a dozen different "disruptive" VC-backed apps shoved onto a device you carried with you to take and share pictures of your cats.

The right to privacy exists to protect the individual from the kind of harm that couldn't happen before 1890.

I referred to actual privacy, not the abstract right to privacy.

In 1890 most Americans lived with much less physical privacy than we enjoy today. Extended families, small towns or crowded urban apartments, everyone knows everyone else’s business. Police and employers had much more power to intrude into private affairs. People would spy and snitch. Women and children treated like property, employees under surveillance.

Sure, in 1890 people were free of social media and advertisers and the NSA. On the other hand their boss or the police could ask about very personal things and fire or arrest homosexuals or anyone perceived as socially deviant. If you go back farther in history you discover a world where privacy was something only the very elite might enjoy. Everyone else had about as much privacy as cattle.

I don't think there's a solution. Maybe high fines and years in prison. Let it be known that if you share that video of your ex you will end up locked for a good while.

And I also think all porn sites should allow only verified users to upload.

Depends on what you mean by “solution.” If you mean “eliminating,” probably not. Thousands of years of human cultural evolution have not eliminated murder, rape, assault, theft, or any of the many terrible things people do to each other. The best solutions we’ve come up with are laws, social norms, enforcement, punishment.

We can solve the problem for ourselves to some degree: don’t take photos or make videos that you don’t want everyone to see. No embarrassing photos/videos, no way for someone to use them against you. Rampant narcissism and public exhibitionism will probably continue to supply material that will inevitably get misused.

Deep fakes present another problem. We don’t have a solution for forgeries in other contexts, except for the usual laws and punishment. My guess is that if deep fakes become a widespread thing no one will trust images and videos they come across (unless there’s some reason to believe the material is real). If we could find suspicious porn everywhere it would lose its value to cause shame and embarrassment, because claiming it is fake would be more than plausible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com