CYBERSPACE—In a viral social media post, a user on the Chinese platform Weibo claims that he has been able to use facial recognition algorithms to identify women who appear in online porn videos—for the purpose of determining whether wives or girlfriends have ever done porn, according to a new report by the site Vice.com.
The Chinese social media user’s post went viral thanks to a translation posted by a Stanford University Ph.D. student on his Twitter account. According to the posts, the Chinese programmer has created a database of the 100,000 women, which he may soon open for access by curious men who want to check out the porn pasts of their significant others.
“A Germany-based Chinese programmer said he and some friends have identified 100k porn actresses from around the world, cross-referencing faces in porn videos with social media profile pictures. The goal is to help others check whether their girlfriends ever acted in those films,” wrote Stanford doctoral candidate Yiqin Fu.
Vice reporter Samantha Cole wrote that the Chinese programmer had offered no evidence for his claims, but contacted through his Weibo account said that he would soon provide “database schema” and “technical details.”
Feminist author Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger took to her own Twitter account, condemning the claim as an example of how technological advances target women.
“This is horrendous and a pitch-perfect example of how these systems, globally, enable male dominance,” she wrote. “Surveillance, impersonation, extortion, misinformation all happen to women first and then move to the public sphere, where, once men are affected, it starts to get attention.”
One commenter on the programmer’s Weibo posts, according to the Yiqin Fu translation, asked whether there was any legal liability involved in creating the database of women who have appeared in online porn.
“He said everything he did was legal because 1) he hasn't shared any data, 2) he hasn't opened up the database to outside queries, and 3) sex work is legal in Germany, where he's based,” Yiqin Fu explained.
“This is a painfully bad idea—surveillance and control of women’s bodies taken to new low,” wrote University of Maryland law professor Danielle Citron, who has studied the legal implications of deepfakes technology on her Twitter account.
The programmer had not yet provided his promised evidence that he had actually accomplished the facial recognition feat that he claimed, according to the Vice report.
Photo By Transportation Security Administration / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
