> The practice typically involves offenders sending an unsolicited sexual image to people via social media or dating apps, but can also be over data sharing services such as Bluetooth and Airdrop.
I'd wager the majority of cases they refer to being via social media and dating apps given the language.
Registered sex offenders sending pictures of their dicks to teenagers who are foolish enough in their youth to share their Snapchat name publicly in hopes of making a social connection.
Not national security, but an arguably reasonable law enforcement target.
The more granularity and internationalization the higher likelihood it'll be used for grooming, sex trafficking, and fraud. Tinder, Snapchat, TikTok, and other mediums are already rife with it.
I don't understand what would motivate someone to ever send an explicit photo of themselves to a stranger. The whole premise of this scam makes no sense. Like, is this not the most basic of the basics of online safety?
The point with these apps was to make sexting safer (I'm just going to say it straight out). Not completely safe. If you are sending pictures of your junk to another person, you are always exposed to the risk of getting backstabbed. Same goes if you put a person's junk in your mouth, or some similar behavior.
A degree of trust is required in all relationships, but at least apps like these remove some of the incentive for abuse. And they make it impossible for someone to _inadvertently_ share your photos.
We used to run a dating site where people could exchange pics. We had to manually check every submission. Loads of cp, we had a direct link with the police to report them.
Why call out "sextortion" specifically? You could just say that $CRIME is a very real and frequent problem, and if people show the $CRIME messages to their local police detective, will Facebook notify the suspect?
It's already there, in the third paragraph of the article:
“This is a very bad idea,” said Cathy Lanier, chief of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, in an interview. Smartphone communication is “going to be the preferred method of the pedophile and the criminal. We are going to lose a lot of investigative opportunities.”
I think this may already be happening. I have two friends that were catfish blackmailed on dating sites recently. Including convincing pictures that could not be reverse image searched, nudes etc. Ultimate goal in one case was extortion, in the other it may just have been acquiring nudes.
No way to be sure they weren't manual, just looking at some of the chats my friends shared, they were well within the realm of what could be achieved with GPT-2 level systems. And mostly echoing the sentiments my friends were expressing, or escalating the conversation in fairly stereotypical ways. Most dating chat / sexting is pretty superficial initially. If this isn't automated already, it's purely due to lack of sophistication on the part of the attackers, there's no technical issue.
I could imagine an abusive partner enabling this to make sure their partner isn’t sexting other people. Given the pushback for AirTags I’m surprised people aren’t more concerned.
sexual harassment is too extreme. 20 years of prison in some places.
Cyber flashing is indeed the more appropriate term.
I will be absolutely unequivocally clear about my opinion on this: Cyber flashing does not deserve jail time. It deserves being banned from bumble. Anyone who is so low and so cruel to jail someone for cyber flashing... that person is the one who deserves jail time.
Also logistically you'd be jailing millions of people if it was sexual harassment.
In short, dick pics are a problem with people being stupid. Not a problem with people being criminals. Let's keep the wording appropriate to the severity of the infraction. It's cyberflashing... NOT sexual harassment.
That's not assault, but it can definitely be used for harassment and other forms of social damaging. I posted this an excerpt from an article (on anonymous Telegram groups) a few days ago:
Filing charges is pointless, says Ezra. Since two years, she's being harassed on Telegram. It started when she was sixteen: photoshopped nudes with her snapchat account were circulated. They had taken selfies from her social media, and those of her family, and combined them with porn fragments. She doesn't know the perpetrator, but that person takes a lot of trouble to ruin her. "Nowadays, the boys have so many ways to make it look real." source: de Groene Amsterdammer,146/33, p. 21.
While unlikely, it could be used for worse. Let's say a local or niche publication has an app and can detect if any of its subscribers are also using Grindr, Tinder, or some sort of app that signifies, to them, some cardinal sin on the part of the subscriber. That could be used to blackmail/shame/harass people.
The article talks about "safe sexting" education as a solution, but I'd like to suggest that such a thing does not and perhaps will never exist.
It's great that you trust the person you're sending the pictures to not to share them, but you also have to trust:
1) That same person with that same responsibility even after you break up, including when they're at their most angry with you.
2) That nobody (your school, your ISP, your government) is eavesdropping on your communication method.
3) The software that's being used to both send and receive the photo.
4) That the recipient will keep their phone or PC physically secure so that random people can't just click "Photos" and view them.
5) That the recipient won't get "hacked" and have your photos uploaded online somewhere without their knowledge.
There's a lot of parallels with DRM and copyright - once you've converted something into an easily-copyable form and sent it across a network, it's very, very hard to make sure that it never gets copied again. We should be telling teenagers (and maybe some older people too...) the truth - that if they sext, no matter how much they trust the other person, they're taking a risk that their photos might end up shared more widely.
Agree. Oh, and it will be also be used to generate other nudes - people create fake accounts, send the nudes as if they were theirs, and incite the other person to send nudes of their own.
That may or not be paranoid, but it's not really on topic. The users in this case had were actively using their webcams and sending images over the Internet to chat partners.
It is very disappointing but I am not exactly sure why Telegram should be held accountable. I understand Telegram facilitates this behaviour, but I think we should be prosecuting the offenders.
You can also print and mail (physically) revenge porn pictures of your ex-girlfriend to their parents and coworkers. Does that mean your country's postal system should open and inspect every single letter they handle? Not only this is a gross violation of privacy, but this is also logistically unfeasible. UK's Royal Mail would probably have to hire 20 times its current workforce, and they would still face significant delays.
But again, I am 100% for putting the people who share revenge porn in jail. There is no excuse for exposing someone's naked body without their consent to strangers.
I'd wager the majority of cases they refer to being via social media and dating apps given the language.
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