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Comment by orthoxerox | Hacker News Reader

Russian imageboards found VK profiles of quite a few porn actresses and prostitutes using findface.ru. Of course, they immediately started harrassing them and sending messages to everyone in their friends list.

However, ethics aside, the cat is out of the bag. People can shame the guy into deleting the data, but computing power will only get cheaper and data matchers faster. Sooner or later some will do this again and launch a Tor site with an up-to-date database. We have to adjust to the idea that if you have a social media profile any public images of you will lead people to it sooner or later. And it will be sooner, not later, with every passing year.

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Yes, but that shoudln't prevent society to also make those particular use of tech very costly. It should be consider like holding a concealed weapon: you need a permit, or you get jail time.

Permit should not be hard to get, as long as you can justify professional or research need.

But letting this go is creating a society I don't want to live it. I already hate, living my anonymous life, when some stranger take my photo without asking. It happens more and more.

On the other end, people filming the police get in more and more trouble.

We got things reversed.

If you are already a criminal, you aren't worried about the lack of a permit that much. Especially when you are a cybercriminal separated from your server by multiple cryptocurrency tumblers.

Forward intelligence teams already record the faces of people taking part in peaceful and legal protests. You can bet your ass they cross-ref the feed with their Linkedin and Facebook data dumps. The same tech is now becoming available to everyone.

The USA can prevent its people from putting an M2 on their truck. Mexico can't (in some states). Syria can't (almost anywhere). The internet is closer to Mexico than the US.

This is something so many people do not seem to understand: if you ban something, you only prevent law abiding citizens from using it, it won't stop the law breakers who were going to use it regardless of what the law says. There are people who DDOS video game servers in the US as to not lose the game, even though it's a felony.

> you only prevent law abiding citizens from using it

Most people are law abiding citizens most of the time, so laws are not pointless.

And laws typically give us a way to come after those who violate the law.

Sure, laws won't fix a problem once and for all, but if they can reduce the problem by 90% they are a big win.

No. In france we rarely see criminals with guns. It happens. But it's not a common event.

Same in Australia.

I think that probably these things could even get completely prevented if people acted more consciously. It starts with DNS providers and hosters who should be aware of what people are doing with their services and shut them down if they aren't ethically good.

Probably Telcos and especially also CDNs should do the same. I don't talk about any packet inspection. But sometimes it's obvious what people are up to.

Basically everybody in society can do something against this by not looking away. Also more diversity in tech would have prevented a lot of malicious uses I think.

That could be dangerous, though, as social mores change and the things which are "ethically good" become different. I'm already not a big fan of "deplatforming", and this seems like basically the same thing.

How is this possibly enforceable though? The software is already out there and available. In countries that restrict guns, it's often quite hard to get one outside the legal channels (if there are any), so enforcement is pretty effective. But for something you can just download??

Not just download, but write yourself in a short time. And the code could be shared, and I’d guess you can build a decent system to do this in a few hundred lines.

It’s a ridiculous proposition to restrict software access, akin to making it illegal to write on paper.

It's ridiculously easy to write a DoS tool. Let's make DoSing legal then.

The two aren't the same thing at all. It's legal to own guns, but illegal to shoot someone with one. It's legal to write software that opens network connections, but illegal to use said software against a target on the Internet that doesn't want said traffic.

Similarly, it's legal to write or download a neural network that is programmed for facial recognition. Same for a basic crawler bot.

Laws are often difficult to enforce, but that is not a reason to not have the laws.

The point of a law isn't the law in its own right, it's to solve a problem. And an unenforceable law isn't actually solving anything.

There's a difference in being difficult to enforce and impossible to enforce. Laws like we are discussing here are enforceable enough.

You mean, you want to prevent people from comparing public images against public videos on the public internet, by requiring them to obtain licensing?

This approach will just entrench FAANG even more and squeeze out SMBs even more.

Yes, absolutely. First criminal would be governments, who spy and track their own citizens with impunity.

I'm sure the same could be done with anything entropic enough to identify me, like my writing style (lexicon, commas, typos).

For a long time now I've assumed that everything I post online will eventually be cross-referenced back to me, if somebody cared enough.

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