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Comment by mam2 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. I feel no one is able to realize that at the end of the day, the bottom line is that there will NEVER exist a way to PROVE consent without doubt.

Even if you say yes you could say no later. Even if you have marks, it could be some weird rough sex / kink thing.

Am i really the only one to see it ?

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Part of being human and interacting with other humans is a certain level of uncertainty. To a lot of people, uncertainty is fundamentally scary and unacceptable. They look at other people (and to some extent themselves) and hate what they see there. Then they try to deny that essential nature through exerting more and more control over what they see.

Fundamentally, I think it is indicative of a failing in modern society. These folks have somehow managed to grow up to hate their emotions and those of other people, and now spend a large part of their life trying to murder them whenever they see them. It's immature and destructive and we owe it to each other to do better.

Even if you do everything right you can still end up hurting someone. And that should feel bad, regardless of what you intended. I think taking responsibility for that potential harm is just part of being a grown up. You have to accept your own vulnerability. And hurting others is bad regardless of technicalities.

No reasonable person would be a living martyr for someone else's sensibilities. The world you're asking for is one where few would want to involve themselves with others for fear of stepping on someone else's toes. While one can be understanding, one is not obliged carry out this "responsibility" of living for others or with others' beliefs in mind.

You are too judgmental. Rape id a real thing and it destroys people.

The intention of the app is good. Its just not gonna work

Nothing about formalised consent will prevent rape, and anyone who thinks otherwise has not spent any time thinking about the problem. If that can't be judged unfavorably, I'm not sure what can.

Thats not the judging part.. this is:

"Fundamentally, I think it is indicative of a failing in modern society. These folks have somehow managed to grow up to hate their emotions and those of other people, and now spend a large part of their life trying to murder them whenever they see them. It's immature and destructive and we owe it to each other to do better."

Yeah, or people are actually waking to the fact that girls get raped more than what society thought and want to fight back

Being sexually active is particularly dangerous for heterosexual women.

It's nearly impossible to prove a rape case in court. Because of this, there has been some groundswell of support for relaxing the burden of proof in rape cases to a standard that might ultimately permit some false accusations to result in wrongful convictions (a horrifically bad idea that would likely be a Pandora's box imo).

If you reduce this down to the fundamental tension: either we have to ask women to become dramatically more vigilant and accept some nonzero risk of rape (more or less what we implicitly do already) OR we have to increase the likelihood of wrongful convictions.

As far as I've been able to discern, there is no good solution here. And that's how asinine ideas like this "sex consent app" show up. It's a kind of manifestation of denial.

Came here to say more-or-less this.

We now define consent as something so etheral (probably rightly so) that it's virtually impossible to prove it was granted (clearly, "leave me alone" remains unambiguous). People can change their mind but feel coerced to continue, or grant consent to something different than what ends up happening. Court cases thus go down the "he said, she said" route.

I don't really know how to get out of that.

The flipside is that, indeed, because genuine accusations are so thin on physical proof, it is so hard to separate them from fake ones. Whenever I hear someone publicly shamed for sexual misconduct and the wrath of public opinion descends on them, a part of me shudders at the thought of that happening to an innocent person, with no defense available.

> If you reduce this down to the fundamental tension: either we have to ask women to become dramatically more vigilant and accept some nonzero risk of rape (more or less what we implicitly do already) OR we have to increase the likelihood of wrongful convictions.

There's a third way, but perhaps equally unappetizing: record all interactions.

I'm going to assume you mean a video recording, which is the only way to be absolutely certain about what occurred when you have exactly two witnesses who also happen to be the accuser and the accused.

I omitted this possibility for obvious reasons.

Well, you'd record as much as you can.

Video is obvious, but assuming you use a modern phone, you might as well add other sensors like accelerometer data, and extra channels like all WhatsApp conversations.

> I'm going to assume you mean a video recording, which is the only way to be absolutely certain about what occurred when you have exactly two witnesses who also happen to be the accuser and the accused.

Alas, even videos can be ambiguous. Eg picture some BDSM play. There can be lots of context required to make a decision.

> no good solution here

The solution is the de-stimulation of society from an era of overt sexual manipulation and an adjustment of expectations regarding the value of casual sexual activities.

This is true for all forms of crime. No form of evidence is perfect: eyewitness accounts (human memory is terrible), DNA/fingerprinting/similar (mismatches do occur), circumstantial evidence (obviously not hard proof), confessions (people do dumb things in stressful situations, could be coerced), picture/video (becoming increasingly easy to fake, can be taken out of context).

As a result, when looking at rape cases (like with other crimes), we use degrees of certainty and corroborate multiple sources of evidence. The legal system in the US requires "beyond a reasonable doubt", not "100% certain" - because the latter is impossible.

While this is technically true, it's important to note that modern criminal justice systems are designed to minimize the likelihood of false convictions at the expense of increasing the likelihood of false acquittals. It's supposed to be very hard to achieve a conviction. And this feature is essential for social stability. History is replete with examples of disastrous alternatives.

Of course, to be clear this wasn't meant to be a "we can't be perfect so don't bother trying" opinion.

My point was more that while I think the app is kinda dumb for other reasons (am I expected to pull out my phone during sex if revoke consent????), dismissing it as "we can't 100% prove consent" would effectively apply to all evidence of rape and just crimes in general.

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