Show HN: Loti – Remove revenge porn using facial recognition on adult sites
goloti.com
goloti.com
How do you programmatically discern between non-consensual adult images being shared against the subject's wishes versus images where they are somewhere public, don't own the copyright to the photo, but the law does not require the copyright holder remove or take down the image?
Cool idea, might need to pivot, regardless an interesting space to be in in these times.
EDIT: Appreciate the replies!
We do have ML models running in the background to detect abuse and the accounts are flagged to management to reach out to those customers. I don't want to go through all the cat-and-mouse strategies we may have to avoid people gaming them.
If someone has taken pictures for a company and given their model release for that image and its made its way to an adult site, then the individual should not initiate a DMCA. This is something we make our customers aware of before they DMCA content. Also, we know from first hand experience that site operators are quick to deny a DMCA if they do own rights for it. We've talked to them about this very situation.
Depending on the circumstances, who the copyright holder is is immaterial.
Also, IANAL! Not legal advice!
Try to run a marketing campaign for any brand without getting model release forms for everyone depicted and you’ll see exact how legal responds.
Loti uses state of the art facial recognition algorithm built with proprietary models. It takes into consideration a dozen facial characteristics in more than 1 angles to find matches from a collection of more than 50 million data sets. We keep adding millions of new data every month to make sure we don't miss out any privacy breach of your photo.
Here's the real study: https://www.naag.org/attorney-general-journal/an-update-on-t...
Also, I don't think these numbers could be extrapolated to every country/region/culture on earth but they do seem to hold for european and english speaking markets.
EDIT: regarding our marketing, I’ve cited our source.
Do you think it’s useful to state that given your own admission that it’s likely much lower?
Like lol what a silly premise. “Look to your left, look to your right, if you can’t find revenge porn of either of these people, there’s revenge porn of you! We don’t think this applies to the billions of people that don’t speak English or live in Europe, but we have very enlightened definitions of ‘percentage’ and ‘people’”
EDIT: I'll just make one more comment about our marketing materials then I'm going to leave it alone.
Most people don't realize how prevalent NCII is. Most people would be mortified to find out our database is home to millions of hidden cameras from short-term rentals, bathrooms, changing rooms and private environments of that ilk.
We want to encourage everyone to at least check to see if this is something they may be a victim of. We used solid referenced studies from reputable agencies to highlight how common this problem can actually be.
For everyone and anyone that wants to upload a picture, without giving us a credit card we'll check for free. That's part of our onboarding and that's what happens for the majority of signups. People upload a picture, we say "there is nothing we've found" and they bounce.
What we don't want people to think is, "This service is only for people that send intimate images, there is no way I'm impacted by this." Unfortunately, this problem is far more common than most realize. I feel like your stance only highlights that.
We want people to try, for free, to see if there is content out there we can help them remove.
Can you answer a simple yes or no to the statement “I believe that there are over two and a half billion victims of revenge porn”?
If yes, why did you post this:
> > Also, I don't think these numbers could be extrapolated to every country/region/culture on earth but they do seem to hold for european and english speaking markets.
If no, why is that figure used on your website?
We’ve established that your website’s claim that there are 2.6 billion victims of revenge porn isn’t shared by people that work at Loti and it’s more likely ~400 million.
Given that fact, if you were able to get 1% of those people to subscribe (4 million) at $8/mo, you would be taking in $32,000,000 per month ($384,000,000 per year).
Would you not be the most profitable entity in the business of revenge porn?
Its not like your content once id'd and removed can't be uploaded again so why would there be recurring fees?
Look at youtube and the phenomenal work done there to get the same contentID'd video on via transforms.
I genuinely have no idea, but that’s how they’ve decided to price this. For $8 you don’t even get takedowns or search results according to the pricing page. As far as I can tell you give them $8 per month in exchange for a monthly email saying “We ran a search.”?
This is quite a bizarre company.
It's a money making machine! /s
The internet and digital cameras being available to everyone was a mistake, when I come to power I'm just outright banning any transmission or storage of any photos of naked human bodies with the exception of medical reference pics. Or I'll just ban cellphones and home computers from civillian use entirely.
EDIT: I probably wouldn't ban the internet or home computers, but I'd at least completely ban porn, and use a tool like OPs to enforce such a ban with extreme prejudice. Anyone hosting or running a site with such content would face years of hard labor
It’s good for you to shine a light on the problematics aspects of this tech but this is a decades old industry so I think you are being a bit harsh by treating the poster as if they are creating a new problem.
So the cloud providers will:
- make bank from the social networks hosting your content/likeness
- make bank from the offensive/exploitation AIs trying to exploit your content/likeness for gain
- make bank from the detection/defensive AIs looking for exploits of your content/likeness
The laws will never catch up.
People are warned that an image lives on the internet forever, this has been especially true for images that are not consensually taken or shared. We’re fixing that.
We created Loti (https://goloti.com), a service that uses facial recognition to help users search, find, and reclaim non-consensual intimate images and videos using a streamlined DMCA process we facilitate in our software.
Over 10 million people are victims of non-consensual image sharing in the United States alone. Those are just the people that were even aware that their images were being shared; research shows that up to 30% of victims were hacked or victims of hidden cameras and are unaware.
Our goal is to bring peace of mind that your private images stay private.
Don't get me wrong, revenge porn is bad, but charging people money to take it down seems, well I guess better than nothing but let's hope a nonprofit starts maintaining a database like this and completely eliminates any market this site may capture.
Also abusing the DMCA for censorship, even in pursuit of a noble cause is harmful to society, though maybe not more harmful than revenge porn?
I'm really curious how our culture will continue to reckon with the ideas that
a) There are intimate images extant of many people. Many will become most.
b) AI powered face swapping and image generation will make arbitrary porn trivial on home-gamer GPUs in a few years.
We have to charge money to cover our expenses, most people don't realize how expensive GPU's are and that's the only way to do this cost effectively at scale. Even a non-profit would incur enormous expenses because there is just no way to do this cheap.
There is no abuse of the DMCA process here. Customers are asked to sign an affidavit and we don't allow them to DMCA outside of their facial profiles.
RE: DMCA abuse, it's probably within the letter of the law, the law itself is broken.
Bonus question: How does this all deal with twins? What's the miss rate on facial recognition anyway?
Some things provide a social good but also have expenses, this happens to be one of them. Doctors charge patients, lawyers charge their clients and we aren't anywhere near those margins.
EDIT: Twins are still a weak spot for us, but we have a plan to build a model that can tell two twins apart.
> Doctors charge patients, lawyers charge their clients.
Yeah I'm aware, but because that happens doesn't mean it's the most prosocial system we can implement. I think that you're probably doing good on net and I probably shouldn't have been so negative.
I do worry though that inadequate capitalistic solutions to these sorts of problems serve to preserve a bad status quo in the long run and may end up doing more harm than good?
Instead of a bunch of happy customers of your service, you are going to see people complain constantly about your product and consider you a "protection racket". You are also going to find yourself in the situation where the people you are helping are claiming you are "in cahoots" with the porn companies, particularly when they realize that they have to keep paying your subscription fee in order to avoid their stuff being posted again and again to different sites.
Some things are just asking for a world of hurt, and you need to really really play up the charity angle here and frankly attempt to fund as much of this as possible off of people who aren't the victims you are trying to protect or from a narrative perspective--which a lot of people don't spend enough time analyzing--you are going to spend the rest of your existence playing defense against your own target market feeling like you are part of their problem.
(My credentials here, with respect to talking about "narratives": I'm a well-known engineer who used to spend a lot of time attempting to correct the story developers would tell around jailbreaking and piracy--in some cases due to the mere word "jailbreaking", which I had not myself chosen as I wasn't there at the beginning--and who later went into politics and has been an elected government official in a dense college community for the past five years.)
As far as $100/mo for creators, they typically have to pay $300-$400/mo for DMCA services that make the creators bring them links. We find the content and provide a self-serve portal which is all that’s needed for most major sites. So we are dramatically cheaper than the current offering.
The $25/mo plan is more or less a reflection of rising costs with everything. We do have to hire data scientist, data engineers, software engineers, design, marketing and infrastructure. It may be easy to build this for a single site but if people knew how long it took a $35k A100 to watch a single minute of video and realize there are millions of minutes of video to watch, $25/mo (cancel whenever from the portal) feels like a pretty good deal. I’m open but you would be surprised at how expensive this is.
In an ideal world, we make enough off creators to offer it for free to victims of NCII. Right now, we are self funded and hundreds of thousands of dollars in so we can’t adhere to the normal SV economics of giving it away for free, even if we want to.
All of this to not lose the point that we really enjoyed your feedback and there is a lot you’ve given us to think about.
Do you think that is a good idea?
For instance, if your alert email contains a link to the video, a bad actor who also had access to that email account now potentially had a blackmail opportunity.
I am sure you handle all this carefully but you have to admit it is fraught.
phrasing