Taking a Naked Selfie? Your Phone Should Step in to Protect You | Hacker News Reader

Taking a Naked Selfie? Your Phone Should Step in to Protect You

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

9 pointsdataminer7 comments

It's going to go into somebody's cloud whether you like it or not as soon as you send it to somebody else, unless the "private" flag is an end-to-end solution. If I send a private file or photo to someone, it should be encrypted with an ephemeral key which is not stored but sent to another device immediately, so that in rest it's not accessible. Then when the recipient receives the file, it is decrypted and placed immediately into their device's "private" space.

I'm not opposed to the ideas presented here in an ideal world, but image recognition is far from perfect and if developers attempt to implement this (making their photo apps the equivalent of something other than a "common-carrier" of image bits) when it inevitably fails to detect a "nudie" it seems likely they will eventually be sued, especially if they implement an "underage" filter (which the article also suggests) that fails (which it of course inevitably will, and often).

I do think it is pretty bad that some platforms/apps default to sync-to-cloud in a way that the use of cloud storage may not be clear to the user. I still remember the uneasy feeling I got the first time I took a photo with Google+ and it asked me if I wanted to automatically upload all subsequent photos to the "cloud", and that's despite the fact that 1) I don't use my phone to take nudies anyway and 2) at least Google+ asked and didn't default to sync-to-cloud.

I think the easiest way to do this is have a little lock icon when you're previewing the photo after you've taken it. Clicking on the icon makes it private (i.e. it doesn't go to the cloud and goes into a "private" password protected album only on your phone).

An alternative might be to have a different mode for the camera, private and public. Kind of like incognito mode on Chrome.

This is an interesting idea. There'd need to be a delay between when the photo is taken and when the device OS begins to commit to "the cloud" to allow the user enough time to lock it down before it begins transmission.

This might actually be a great vehicle for promoting more secure technology. For many people this hits a lot closer to home than any of the arguments that were presented with the NSA revelations.

The last thing I want when I'm taking a nude picture is for my camera to recognize anything.

I see you're taking a picture of your junk, would you like me to photoshop it bigger?

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