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Comment by vr46 | Hacker News Reader

What bit of "intimate images shared without a victim's consent" is lacking context in the article?

What qualifies as an "intimate image"? A photo of someone in a swimsuit at the beach?

Fictional content is also covered by this law. How do we determine what fictional content counts as an intimate image of a real person? What if the creator of an AI image adds a birthmark that the real life subject doesn't have, is that sufficient differentiation to no longer count as an intimate image of a real person? What if they change the subject's eye color, too?

If you envision yourself as a potential victim of such content, I think the answers to these questions all become pretty obvious. A swimsuit photo might or might not be intimate, depending on what kind of swimsuit it is and the context in which the person posting the photo is presenting it. A birthmark you don't have or a different eye color obviously do not make a fictionalized image become "not you" because they would not reduce the violation you'd feel.

> A birthmark you don't have or a different eye color obviously do not make a fictionalized image become "not you" because they would not reduce the violation you'd feel.

What if someone claims to feel violated by an image of a person that looks totally different: different skin color, different build, different facial structure, etc?

Then they'll try to convince the authorities that the image is of them, and presumably mostly fail although in some cases they may succeed. (If you're worried about something like the US DMCA, that's almost certainly not going to be the proposal; the UK has a number of existing 48 hour takedown policies, and they all involve orders from the authorities rather than self-certified requests from random third parties.)

> Then they'll try to convince the authorities that the image is of them, and presumably mostly fail although in some cases they may succeed.

How will the government determine which images fail or succeed this claim?

Presumably the same way they investigate revenge porn complaints today? I don't mean to be obtuse, I understand your questions are rhetorical, but I don't see what it is you're gesturing towards.

In the case of revenge porn, there's an image of a real person. By contrast, fictional content doesn't affect actually show a real person, so any attempt to prohibit fictional revenge porn must target images that merely look similar to a person. What degree of similarity is required to qualify? That dimension isn't a factor in real revenge porn.

Perhaps you're missing the context? In the incidents which led to this proposal, no judgment of similarity was necessary, the sexualized images were posted in the replies to non-sexualized images of the same person.

This isn't really a novel dimension in the first place, I don't think. It's just rarely an issue in practice, because most people who post these images do so to shame and embarrass the depicted person. No doubt there will be edge cases where a sexualized image of consenting person A gets taken down because they look similar to non-consenting person B - but is that really a big problem?

The law doesn't stipulate that the offending images have to be posted with the intent to shame or embarrass, nor that the images have to be sent directly to the person that's supposed to be depicted in the image. If that's the justification, then the legislators ought to have put wording to that effect into the law.

What law are you referring to? The amendment described in the source article has not yet been written.

As you point out, this is a proposed amendment to an already existing law.

> The government said: "Plans are currently being considered by Ofcom for these kinds of images to be treated with the same severity as child sexual abuse and terrorism content, digitally marking them so that any time someone tries to repost them, they will be automatically taken down."

Unless I'm mistaken, CSAM is prohibited entirely in the UK, not just in replies to the child depicted in the abusive imagery. They explicitly say that they intend to make fictional intimate content allegedly depicting a real person to be treated the same way as CSAM.

There's nothing that suggests to that this new amendment prohibiting fictional content is going to be narrowly scoped to replies to the people allegedly being depicted.

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