Porn companies adopt facial-recognition technology, encourage Instagram photos
Two porn companies are courting web surfers to upload photos they find online to the companies' free facial-recognition, face-matching database services.
With SexFaceFinder.com and Naughty America's "Face" anyone can upload an image and have the services match it with images and faces in image databases.
SexFaceFinder positions its service as a way for users to find a performer that looks like s specific person.
Or to find performers that look like the user's favorite type of model, in an effort to engage the user with a service that closes the marketing gap between a user and their fantasy.
Another company, Naughty America, openly solicits users to upload images of girls found on Instagram and other internet destinations in an effort to find the photo's subjects in porn - or find celebrity look-alikes, girlfriend and ex-girlfriend look-alikes, or similar/specific porn performers.
Naughty America's facial recognition matching openly asks users to try photos of girls they find on Instagram and other social media websites.
Both adult companies are first in the adult industry's commercial implementation of facial recognition image matching technology.
Let's hope no one finds out the hard way whether or not Naughty America and SexFaceFinder's databases are maintained with mechanisms in place to deal with false, inappropriate or misattributed data - such as database inclusion without consent.
On SexFaceFinder, launched earlier this month, users upload a photo and results show the uploader same or similar adult performers - ones available for live chat sessions. It currently pulls its database search from ImLive, an adult webcam service.
According to Naughty America's press, it attempts to match user-uploaded images to its own porn database.
Naughty America is widely partnered across the online sphere. Its newest partnership is with infidelity-themed dating website Ashely Madison (and Cougar Life) and gives Naughty America website members access to these services.
Naughty America's service launched in June, right after Facebook acquired facial recognition company Face.com.
Commenting on Facebook's acquisition at the time of launch, Naughty America CEO Eddie Arenas said in a press release,
The timing couldn't have been better than for us to develop our facial recognition tool just on the heels of Facebook acquiring a facial recognition company. Great minds think alike.
Great minds, indeed.
This August, Germany accused Facebook of "illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent" and demanded that the social network destroy its archive of files based on facial recognition technology.
Facebook had acquired Face.com six months after Privacy Rights Clearinghouse director Beth Givens told an FTC summit on facial recognition technology that there is insufficient public awareness about all aspects of facial recognition tech, and zero auditing mechanisms in place for any entity using the technologies.
We hope both porn companies are planning to implement the FTC's October staff report on facial recognition image practices, in which the ACLU notes:
The FTC recommends that companies using face recognition “design their services with privacy in mind.” Specifically:
- Provide good security for images and other biometric data, including measures to prevent unauthorized scraping of images for uses not authorized by the subject.
- Establish “appropriate retention and disposal practices” for consumer images, such as disposing of data that is no longer needed.
- Obtain a consumers “affirmative express consent” before a) using his or her image “in a materially different manner than they represented when they collected the data,” or b) to “identify anonymous images of a consumer to someone who could not otherwise identify him or her,” such as a stranger in a bar.
SexFaceFinder states on each page they do not save the uploaded images, although I noticed that their Privacy Policy states that pictures are collected under the 'personal information' disclaimer.
In Naughty America's Upload Terms, users agree that submitted photos:
(...) may be edited, removed, modified, published, transmitted and displayed by the Company and you waive any rights you may have in the material. (...) You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the Company and its agents for all claims resulting from content you submit to the Site.
2. License Granted. To the extent any Submission is copyrightable material, you grant the Company and its authorized agents a non-exclusive, royalty free, perpetual and fully sub-licensable right to use, post, publish, reproduce, adapt, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such Submission throughout the world in any media and for any purpose.
By way of example, the Company may sublicense the content and allow third parties to use the material for any purpose.
For anyone who has been following the slice of privacy apocalypse battleground between nonconsensual implementation of facial recognition technology (commercial: SceneTap, Facebook; government: TrapWire) versus people with privacy rights everywhere - seeing porn stumble its way into the fray will elicit the ::headdesk heard around the world.
Or maybe that's just me you heard banging my head on my desk.