Can Data Die? | Hacker News Reader

Can Data Die?

pudding.cool

Give me a break! All this "controversy" about Lena Forsén is nothing but puritanical feminism run amok. Lena appeared in Playboy, for God's sake. If anyone around here deserves privacy, she ain't it. Besides, models rarely own their own images. They are paid for the session, and that's it. The commercial owners can use the images as they see fit.

The fact that Lena was used as a wonky pinup by some early tech guys merely means they were normal straight men. Tech girls are free to experiment with Channing Tatum's shirtless pictures. The answer to pinup images is more pinups, not less.

why do we need to include our sexual preferences in our work?

Do we? The image is cropped, there is nothing sexual left (unless you have a fetish for shoulders). The sad thing about this controversy is that there where plenty of successful and impactful women in tech and science, but instead of calling them out as examples to look up to we get a two page rant about a thirty year old crop of a nude image outshining the current generation of militant feminists in management positions.

Another story about Lena Forsén, the woman who consented to selling naked images of herself, but now is being touted around for not consenting to a bunch of nerds using a version of the image that she had sold and doesn't own, which crops out everything but her face. As far as I know, this image isn't even regularly used in most new compression tests anymore. But she's still getting brought up as if she's some kind of victim. So can data die? Apparently not as long as there's false victimhood to be sold. At least the presentation of the page is nice.

Victimhood? I didn't get any of that from the page.

The "consent" the page is talking about is her belief that the image should be retired from tech work since it's a crop of a nude image from Playboy.

She's very clearly described as the victim of what the article calls "data exploitation". I'm not sure how you could read this article and miss that. I also understand what the consent is referring to, which I've already addressed: she had consented to the sale of the image. And I also already noted that the image is not typically used in showcasing modern compression algorithms.

Didn’t she show up at some IEEE show?

From what I understand, her career (non-tech, and non-modeling) didn’t suffer from her stint as a Playboy model (I have no idea if it helped, either). Europeans have different ways of looking at sexuality than Americans or British. Not necessarily always a good thing. I know that at least one porn star was elected to the Italian Parliament, and that “flashing” was a fairly standard part of her stump speech.

I respect Lena's wishes and don't really object to not using it anymore. But also, this debate grinds my gears a little every time it comes up. The photo is not a candid, private picture. It was taken by and is owned by Playboy and she was compensated for it. Does it really make sense to revoke consent for something you were compensated for?

I really don't like the implication that you're a misogynist for using the image.

Apart from all the other aspects - is the picture even a good testcase?

I'd assume there are probably far better test images to use when evaluating. Why not use those? If I were to design an algorithm working on images, I'd make sure to test it on the best test cases I could find, exposing flaws and strengths.

The real question is - HOW can we control data that can be screen-shotted like images? Is it really a "genie out of the bottle" or is there some technical way that we can evolve file formats to ensure the owners of an image retain control of the rights to use and reproduce that image?

I knew it's called Lenna image. It was used everywhere before the digital age, too. Like as a benchmark image for printing methods, e.g. what change in parameters lead to what results. I studied in the early '00 and still used that Image for quantify image reproduction qualities. Never thought about it though.. xd nice pic

There's a lot of unflattering photos of Donald Trump that he'd rather didn't exist, but that people love to share. Should we memoryhole all of them? If not, then what argument says that we should memoryhole the Lenna photo but doesn't apply to those ones?

You can't memory hole everything in a world of r/datahoarders

I am concerned about facebook someday claiming ownership over uploaded media (in a " we changed our TOS, continuing use of our product beyond xdate means consent"), or others uploading content extracted from non politically exposed people (e.g. revenge porn)

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