A. My understanding is an underage teen who takes a nude selfie and sends it can be charged with distributing "child porn." This is a serious problem and should not be true. If other people forward it, they should be charged, but a teenager should not get in legal trouble for making a nude selfie and sending it privately.
B. We need to culturally get over a lot of our hangups about certain things. His girlfriend was attending church. The church should be telling kids "This is not worth killing yourself over."
C. We somehow need to come up with reasonable accommodation for the reality that teens have phones and budding sexualities and these two things are colliding horrifically in a legal and cultural system strongly rooted in assuming "child porn" is made solely by abusive adults and not willingly by underage teens who don't think it's a big deal at the time the photo is snapped.
Taking a nude selfie should be safer than baring your body in person. No risk of STDs or pregnancy are involved. And yet we've turned it into this hugely dangerous thing for anyone who hasn't spent years thinking about sexual morality who isn't prepared to say to law enforcement and the world "Nudes of me? Big fucking deal."
No idea how to further any of those things, but this is hardly the first article I've read about teen selfies being involved in extreme levels of harsh consequences that I just think morally should not happen and I think have roots in cultural and legal stuff going bad places in part because we aren't keeping up with the times.
> C. We somehow need to come up with reasonable accommodation for the reality that teens have phones and budding sexualities and these two things are colliding horrifically in a legal and cultural system strongly rooted in assuming "child porn" is made solely by abusive adults and not willingly by underage teens who don't think it's a big deal at the time the photo is snapped.
It's not just the CSAM aspect, it's the whole idea that sex ed is grooming. It's like the difference between saying "you shouldn't have sex until you are a responsible adult" vs "I honestly don't recommend that you have sex at this age, but if you do, here's how to do it safely and responsibly".
Teaching kids "don't send naked pictures of yourself to other people" is one thing, but if they look around and see their peers sext with each other with no real repercussions, this warning will fall on deaf ears. They will file it next to "don't drink until you're 21".
On the other hand, if you start tailoring this message into something like, "sexting is a bad idea, don't do it, especially if you don't know the other person or don't trust them 100%; if you do sext, here's how to minimize the impact of cyberbullying or blackmail: ...", then people will loudly complain that schools are teaching their children how to sext.
I think the people calling sex education "grooming" are the same preventing the legal system to evolve in the way you described. You're very lucky that you could home-school your kids and teach them all this.
It's all very alien to me how teaching safe practice of something that has a huge probability of happening can still be seen as encouraging it, "grooming". Education should be a bare minimum here: here's how your body works, here's your risk of becoming/making your partner pregnant (and what that entails for you), of catching a life-long disease, cancer, or a nasty painful thing, here's what medical science and the FDA says you can both use as contraceptive and their failure rate and side effects, no means fricking no, and all of this compounds if you drink or do drugs...
Not teaching this amounts to not preparing your kid for the actual world and reduces body autonomy and responsible behaviour... They will experiment, and they will do stupid things.
It's as if teaching civics was a gateway to anarchist bombing or teaching chemistry a gateway to Breaking Bad... American puritanism and the whole "teaching is grooming" is such a weird thing.
<"teaching is grooming" is such a weird thing. >
Since grooming has become politicized, the hypocrisy is monumental and finally exposed. So called puritanism is the wrong direction, because as you pointed out, teens will do stupid things.
What about the toxic masculinity culture taught by the right and the church? The right says, "keep these women under control." The church says,"women MUST obey their husbands no matter what." If that's not grooming, I don't know what is.
We home schooled our children. We made sure our kids knew what could happen in life because we are all flawed and sometimes make decisions that could be life altering in unintended ways. We knew that we couldn't educate them enough about the variables of life, but we tried.
I home educated too, and one of the big advantages is that it creates more opportunities to talk to them about things like this.
> The church says,"women MUST obey their husbands no matter what."
Which church exactly says that? Only a fringe group of American evangelicals. I have never come across even them saying "no matter what" although there are probably a few real lunatics who do.
Sorry, I should have mentioned I was referring to the protestant side of evangelicals. The unwritten rule on marriage there is the man always overrules.
Many evangelical fundamentalist churches, for example, use the material from The Institute in Basic Life Principles. On marriage it says,"A husband's authority over his wife is God-given, as is his wife's non-negotiable duty to submit to him; she must respect his position regardless of his "deficiencies".
Unfortunately, I've noticed that the so-called "public opinion" is only getting more prude, and the denial about teenagers having sex drive is only getting worse. Basically nobody wants to be labelled a pedophile, so nobody wants to touch that problem with a three-meter stick.
I don't understand this, aren't pedophiles specifically interested by (non-sexually mature) children, rather than (sexually mature-ish) teenagers ?
There seems to be a lot of (new?) confusion between pedophiles and adults being interested in sexually mature teenagers, which, sure, can cause it's own issues, but is neither a sickness nor a one-way street, and that's what the different majorities of consent and authority and being able to interact with adult industries are for.
And the cutoff for turning fully major and being able to still interact with your slightly younger peers has to be dealt with anyway, ideally in a progressive way.
There are multiple ways of dealing with it. Romeo and Juliet style age of consent laws for example. Not treating teenagers who do something stupid the same way as adults who distribute child porn.
I've also noticed this. On more than one occasion I've been left completely bemused by someone insisting that a teenager couldn't possibly have been seeking out sexual content themselves, and must have been groomed into it by an adult. Sorry, have they met a teenager?
AI generating realistic nude images from normal images will further these things. Because then there will be nudes for everyone, it will be impossible to prove what is real and what is fake, and therefore pointlessness of chasing of 'illegal" numbers will become obvious to more people.
This is going to make this kind of racket more common, and also provide some kind of defence if it goes wrong: "they're fakes" will be more believable.
But it takes some serious mental resilience to contemplate that as a teenager when someone is threatening to send your nudes to the people you love. Not many kids are going to have that kind of intestinal fortitude.
The tendency of porn to give men severe anxiety about their genitals is playing into this; kids are more embarrassed/ashamed about their bodies because all the other penises they've seen are so huge.
We need to get really cool about a whole bunch of stuff really quickly if we're going to make this (and other problems) go away. I don't think AI is going to be part of that.
> kids are more embarrassed/ashamed about their bodies because all the other penises they've seen are so huge.
And this is the problem. In years past kids would be naked with other kids, when changing after gym for example. Nowadays the only penis a boy sees is his own and that of porn people, because we've made normal nude situations extremely rare, especially outside of the context of sex.
This. The whole "you westerners are weird about your bodies because you didn't get to see your grandma's tits when you were kids" thing. We need to normalise nudity as non-sexual, especially within families.
Nope; but to be fair, I also think it's better without it - especially in a post-smartphone era where everyone has a camera in their pocket. The repercussions are just not worth it.
My knee-jerk reaction is that probably some people know what you look like naked. So one means to check: If it's recent, compare it to your actual body.
On the other hand, bodies change over time, so it gets easier to say "That 10 year old pic? No, not real."
(Unless it's extremely attractive. Then enthuse about how gorgeous you once were, I guess, and see if people buy that.)
> His girlfriend was attending church. The church should be telling kids "This is not worth killing yourself over."
I think the problem is knowing what to do preemptively (which affects everyone who might help, not just the church). I am sure that if they asked a priest/paster/whatever they would be told that.
What can you do if they do not ask for. Preach a sermon on this specific problem? There are many variants and you need to get the message across. Maybe a general sermon on the risk of blackmail in general, and talking about where victims can get help, explaining the blackmailer is doing something wrong.
I think parents have a critical role to play. Talk about things like staying safe online, not trusting people, the fact that people assume false identities.
I know my teenage daughter does not disclose her real identity online. I have spoken to her about the dangers of doing so. I will give this as an example, not because I am worried that exactly the same thing would happen, but as an example of the general sort of things that happen. It might be something you say rather than a selfie, for example.
> Taking a nude selfie should be safer than baring your body in person. No risk of STDs or pregnancy are involved. And yet we've turned it into this hugely dangerous thing for anyone who hasn't spent years thinking about sexual morality who isn't prepared to say to law enforcement and the world "Nudes of me? Big fucking deal."
I agree. The law and culture is badly out of date.
> If other people forward it, they should be charged
It’s more complicated than that. Due to a new law in Germany, a teacher getting to know that these images are floating around and forwarding them to the respective parent could be charged for distributing child porn.
I'm actually ok with that. I see no reason why the teacher can't simply advise the parent this is happening without forwarding nudes of their teen to the parent.
I don't actually want to see my sons naked, thanks. They hit puberty, suddenly discovered the concept of privacy and I have no idea what their private parts look like.
Strong agree on the advising of such matters, as for forwarding, how the hell would a teacher have access to the image to forward to the parents?
That’s an insane overreach which could easily lead to abuse, they shouldn’t be accessing children’s phones, especially under the premise of ‘I need that image for safeguarding purposes’ - absolutely fucking not.
> how the hell would a teacher have access to the image to forward to the parents?
By accident? The teacher and the and the other teen have the same first or last name, or the next one in the contact list, or the autofill rearranged just before clicking, or just one missclick... there are so many ways it could have happened.
Then report it to the police, don’t forward a naked image of someone’s child to them? Not only is it likely distribution of CP, it’s also an insane thing to do. As Doreen said, she doesn’t want to see her lads nudes. I’m pretty sure my mother doesn’t want to see my knob either, who in their right mind would forward that to anywhere but law enforcement?
Not to mention your absolute stretch of a scenario. Do kids typically have their teachers phone numbers in their contacts? Have them added on Facebook? Follow them on Insta? These are all genuine safeguarding issues in themselves, imo (granted I haven’t been in school for 10-15 years). I feel you’re being disingenuous here.
> It’s more complicated than that. Due to a new law in Germany, a teacher getting to know that these images are floating around and forwarding them to the respective parent could be charged for distributing child porn.
I was only adressing how this hypothetical teacher could have had access to it, not what they should do about it, since you were making very strong suppositions about it.
> Do kids typically have their teachers phone numbers in their contacts? Have them added on Facebook? Follow them on Insta?
Is it that rare for some teacher (even in high school) to receive some of their students work online? And didn't the Covid situation with remote classes, Zoom, etc, made it possible for such a thing (students having some way of contacting their teachers online) to be way more common now than before?
Anyway, not sure anything I can say could change your mind.
Edit: About what should the teacher do in that case, this was my assumption, I may be wrong, but I think when @pflenker was mentionning this law, they only tried to put it in a scenario in relation with the thread were we could think that child pronography wasn't involved, similar to when @DoreenMichele was mentionning the fact that a teenager sharing (with consent) a nude with other teenagers should not be charged and labeled as CP.
I'm quite confused how forwarding a naked picture of an underage person to literally anyone, except a dedicated law enforcement team, wouldn't have already been distributing it.
>Is it that rare for some teacher (even in high school) to receive some of their students work online?
It's been a while, but when I worked in the education sector we had systems for students to upload their work, get graded, feedback, reports etc. Yeah, you could upload .pngs and .jpgs but it's hardly 'the next contact in the list' or 'maybe they had the same first or last name' in those scenarios, you upload the work for specific classes/courses. Obviously that's a single system, I don't know the full scope of what schools use these days.
> Anyway, not sure anything I can say could change your mind.
No, nothing will change my mind that forwarding nude pictures of minors to literally anyone other than a law enforcement case handler is acceptable.
> It's been a while, but when I worked in the education sector we had systems for students to upload their work, get graded, feedback, reports etc. Yeah, you could upload .pngs and .jpgs but it's hardly 'the next contact in the list' or 'maybe they had the same first or last name' in those scenarios, you upload the work for specific classes/courses. Obviously that's a single system, I don't know the full scope of what schools use these days.
As you (unintentionally) point out, there's money to be made/data to be acquired in Education. A few years ago, before Covid, one of my siblings had to use a cloud offering because of school. I forgot which, Microsoft Team for Education maybe, or Facebook Education Groups. I just remember being disapointed. People are use to their interface, and they have the money to lobby and ads, easier to sell something "free" with easy onboarding to schools administrators.
It’s a weird market, I’ve mainly come across Moodle which was easily the most difficult integration I’ve ever worked on. I had the displeasure of using it several times for testing purposes and I had to wonder, how much money did a director get backhanded for buying that piece of crap?
I presume it’s a very difficult market to break into though for various reasons, a lot of which tech won’t solve any time soon, to the detriment of our new generations.
Edit: wait, Facebook education groups? Is this a thing that schools run, or something else?
I don't think it's insane for a teacher to forward evidence of problematic stuff happening with a kid to the kid's parents. After all, many parents think their kids are angels who can do no wrong.
Granted, in this case I agree that it's better judgment not to forward the picture for all the reasons you've mentioned - but calling it insane is a bit much.
I was molested as a child, so out of vested personal interest I've read a lot of research over the years.
If you're a teacher, it would be wise to assume the parents may be in some way part of the problem.
If you're a teacher coming up with excuses to share nudes of your students with other people, you are at risk of being investigated very seriously as a potential child molester or distributor of child porn.
This is a minefield for a teacher and I don't think it's really a stretch to say it's "insane" or "extremely stupid" or other similarly strong language.
It has bad idea written all over it in blinking neon letters.
Sure, but that's because you've clearly thought about the matter a lot. A sibling comment mentions that teacher go through mandatory reporter training -- if that's the case, then maybe you're right (depends on how frequently that's being refreshed etc.). Otherwise, I think the adjective "naive" is really way more appropriate than "insane".
(And that's part of the reason why some of the ways in which parts of society react to these things is so problematic. If you're reacting that strongly to something that most likely is just the result of naivety, then frankly you have a much stronger claim to being insane than the person who's being naive.)
If I was a teacher and inadvertently ended up with it somehow, I think I would be worried about the accusation so absolutely wouldn't go to the parents before taking some kind of advice or at least telling my superiors/union/law enforcement just to protect myself.
I don’t understand how the other commenters don’t see this! Immediately go to law enforcement and let them deal with it, forwarding to ANYONE is the wrong thing to do, legally and morally, imo.
Sending a nude photo of a child to the child’s parents is absolutely beyond any form of rationality. Discuss the concern with the parents, inform the police, get them to verify that their little angel did in fact take nudes and send them around.
It’s literally forwarding CP. Let the authorities deal with this, if the parent wants to see their kids nudes then… well, I don’t really know what to say other than let the authorities deal with it. They can show them for verification purposes or something, without sending this image to any more devices than it needs to exist on.
The teacher is absolutely going to be reporting it to the police, no matter what else they do. Teachers are mandatory repirters-- if they see anything that could indicate a child is being abused they must report it.
The police and social services, along with school district policy, will advise the next steps, including how parents are informed.
You write church, but it should be parents. Remember those days when parents were held responsible for their kids, how they behave, and whom they become in adult life?
They (us) don't have full control in later teens, but everything leading up to it, mostly yes. But for every parent I see raising kids the hard way (tons of time spent together consistently every day, being a positive role model, motivating and supporting them in all the right directions while explaining in detail the rest), I see the other way (obsessed by their pathetic office careers, kids with phones/screens from very early age that then go mental if they have to spend weekend without them, parents addicted to their phones/other screens too, overweight, depressed, without any real healthy passion(s) in their lives).
The results, I mean the kids, always show how parenting went (barring say some inborne mental issues and traumatic accidents, that I have no right to comment on).
I'd say this leans much more heavily on father too, like it or not. Mother is a safe haven and initial care and nurture, but father is a) hardcore role model for the boys, and b) a template what to look for in partners later for girls. Yeah, missing dad syndrome is brutal, every single effin' time, best mothers do minimize this and thats about it. I don't like it, its deeply unfair, not sure to whom to complain to.
> when parents were held responsible for their kids
Yet your comment reminds me of be the modern opposite take on parental responsibility: blame most everything on childhood trauma, and blame trauma on the parents.
We used to blame autism on mothers.
Seriously, we make as much sense as our ancestors blaming miasma for sickness. Remember the hellscape fad of recovering repressed memories? There are people that blame trauma on their past lives!
We all literally have no idea about any of this: our best bet is to be non-judgemental, do our best to create good communities, and to accept our own ignorance.
> The results, I mean the kids, always show how parenting went
Why is this such a common way to think?
Personally some of the worst things I have done I have learnt from my peers. My middle-class innocent parents are not to blame.
> Mother is a safe haven and initial care and nurture
I think stereotypes are dangerous. I'm middle-aged and while we can make generalisations about mothers and fathers, I've learnt that those generalisations can't be applied to individual mothers and fathers.
Anyways: To my best knowledge I've really veered off the path - please don't delve into my comment too far. Black and white thinking can be a problem and I'm just as guilty of that as anybody: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
In this day and age, if you fall for something like that, just refuse to pay and say you'll tell people it's an AI fake. I think the days of this sort of scam being very effective are over, or will be soon.
I was a teenager a long time ago, but I remember the anxiety and shame about my body that was involved in puberty.
It's a really, really brave teenager that's going to be able to front up with naked photos sent to his parents and friends and say "they're fake". And, of course, if they're not fake and one person finds out, everyone will know soon enough. This kind of stuff is what teenage drama is made of.
From the article: the photo included his pyjamas, which matched hers. How is an AI going to know the exact pattern of pyjamas he wore? It might, but even asking that question is a problem if you're the victim.
I don't think ignoring the problem and telling the victim to toughen up is helping.
Why do we keep thinking that people will wise up to AI-generated content just because it'll eventually be mass-produced and anyone can do it?
Anyone can write absolutely anything with little check and balance on substance, and MILLIONS still believe tabloids and headlines. We've been able to reliably edit photos/video/film for 80 years with an exponential increase in its efficiency within the last 30 - and we still have millions that would take a photo or video's substance at face-value.
You say that but I’ve yet to see an AI deep fake have any real impact so far. At least in the west, the political ones I’ve seen really haven’t got much traction and were quickly dismissed by the mainstream. Sure, there will always be idiots on the fringe who will believe anything that aligns with their current beliefs, there’s little we can do about that, but so far I’m surprised there hasn’t been an AI deepfake that didn’t fizzle within days. I guess we’re early in the game, so time will tell.
Many people have been taken in by "famous billionaire endorses bullshit investment" deepfakes, whether it's Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, or Australia's Twiggy Forrest, Gina Rinehart etc.
The scams are real, the victims are real, it's in the global "west" and sorely under reported and the conveyors (Facebook, Twitter, etc) have washed their hands of dealing with it:
Andrew Forrest’s legal battle to hold social media giant Meta to account over the proliferation of scam ads using his likeness on Facebook has been dealt a major blow.
Robocalls aren’t effective anymore. Emails don’t do much except once in a great while. Mail hasn’t worked since the 80s. I have to imagine IM clients will lose their effectiveness for scamming the same as all the others.
The rule should be, do not reply to strangers that message you privately on any platform. If you're messaging a scammer back and forward you already lost.
Even if they had your actual real nudes, you not replying might even make a real scammer go "shit they don't check their messages", and move to the next target.
The thing is, it never makes sense to fulfill the demands of a blackmailer. The reason is that no matter what you do, the blackmailer either wants something from you, or keeps collecting more blackmail material until he can get something from you. They don't actually care about leaking your stuff and even if they do, they want to maintain leverage so they don't do it all at once.
Meta didn't accept emergency request from police and needed county magistrate order to help assist in investigation.
"Meta has a portal for police to file requests to preserve records of accounts connected to criminal investigations. Like other social media companies, it has to hold the records—including emails, IP addresses, message transcripts and general usage history—for 90 days. It only hands over user data if it’s ordered to do so by a court.
There’s one way to expedite the request: file it as an emergency, meaning a child could be harmed or there’s risk of death. Larson believed this case qualified. He told Meta that a 17-year-old was already dead, and there was a high probability other kids were in danger, too.
*Meta declined his request within an hour, he says. “The request you submitted does not rise to the level of an emergency,” the company responded.*"
Meta was correct. "Exigent circumstances" to the 4th amendment warrant requirement did not apply, because there was no known potential victim at risk. So the cops needed to have a judge sign a warrant. Didn't take long.
that's a slippery slope and exactly why we have a legal framework. "give me hsbauauvhabzbs private messages because he might send CP and thus it's your moral duty!" can be applied to everything. "oh, we didn't find any CP but we now still have their private correspondence on file."
God this is awful. If you have kids, go talk to them. I've already spoken to mine. Aside from the usual (don't send nudes; be careful on the Internet), I also told them that if something like this does happen, it isn't worth your life: everyone masturbates, it isn't anything shameful and I'll still love you anyway.
I’m not a teenage boy, but I got targeted by one these. While it was misdirected (they were trying to blackmail me with someone else’s photos), the whole thing was quite disturbing.
Also iMessage really does not seem to be well designed to handle abuse. Your only option is to block, which is a couple of taps away from a conversation. The block does not instantly take effect cross device, so you still get messages on your Apple Watch until you reboot it. Your only option for reporting anything is when deleting a conversation, and all you can do is say it’s spam.
A friend of mine was also targeted though they didn't have a real photo of him. They claimed to have hacked his webcam and had some blurry thing printed out, but he doesn't have a webcam.
He called in a panic and I told him to ignore it. Nothing ever came of it (because in this case, how could it - and we're both adults, I convinced him even if it were true why would it matter - again, highly case specific but he agreed it wouldnt).
I doubt the same would be true in all cases, just wanted to share.
A common scam is this combined with ‘proof’ in the form of passwords, the passwords often come from hacked databases such as LinkedIn from 2012, or others reported on have I been pwned (pun not intended)
I don't understand what would motivate someone to ever send an explicit photo of themselves to a stranger. The whole premise of this scam makes no sense. Like, is this not the most basic of the basics of online safety?
The short answer is horniness. They are hoping to get some. And indeed, as I understand it, they've received what they think are explicit photos of someone else, so they believe they are in a reciprocal context.
If people were all that good at being rational about safety in the face of possible sexytimes, it's true this wouldn't happen. And we wouldn't have STDs or unintended pregnancies, either. But as the man says, life finds a way.
The basic rule of online safety is not to meet people from the internet IRL and even if, never to get into their cars. And yet, the business of calling strangers over the internet specifically to get into their cars somehow grew into a 200 billion dollar industry. Strange world, isn't it.
Because there is a corporate third party that can identify both the driver and the customer. Moreso the driver than the customer, but then again the driver can have cameras in the vehicle and doesn't carry cash like a taxi does, so they are not in any significant danger either.
> You go on a dating app, a girl responds with her nudes
My first assumption would be the "girl" is a bot and the image generated by AI until proven otherwise, i.e. by meeting up at a public location and seeing it's a real person from my country. Am I too paranoid? It sure feels like the dead internet theory is just about to get real and we should act accordingly.
This (and your grandparent comment) seem like such an unhelpful line of commentary. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt but the vibe I get from those two comments is: "I wouldn't fall for it, therefore other people's kids should know better. It's so obvious!".
People who are exposed to this line of thinking will now be doubly ashamed if they fall for this, making them even less likely to ask for help.
> a girl responds with her nudes and you send yours
But... WHY?! You're not The Rock. Unless you're ripped and/or packing, the chances of your "nudes" sent in reply scaring the recipient away are pretty high.
It's not just teenagers, my friend's brother fell prey to this. His life is one ongoing mental health crisis. These people are truly the scum of the earth, their scam only works on vulnerable people by design. Disgusting.
In my opinion, those two (or three) deserve way longer than 15 years. This wasn't some act of desperation. This was just pure, unfiltered evil that IMO cannot be "corrected".
(1) Most young people are insecure as anything and have unhealthy self-esteem.
(2) Culturally the west is very (and I mean very) ashamed of nudity.
Problem (1) isn't something that can be done half-assed. The kid will need a healthy family, friends, support system. They will need to be free of traumatic influences... While (2) I see as being more practical.
If you look at European countries they are much more naturalist regarding nudity. Like Dutch have their Freikörperkultur (FKK) free body movement where there's many places where you can go and do activities nude. Mixed gender saunas where people are naked are common. Then there's Japan where parents commonly bathe with their children. It teaches them not to be ashamed of their body.
We don't really have anything like that in the west. It's really quite dangerous because its just like: do we expect literal teenagers to practice good opsec when adults can't even get that shit right?
Why would Facebook not just block messages from Nigeria to rando North American towns at this point? Shouldn't the network analysis required to detect this sort of crime ring be a slam-dunk at this point? I don't get how this is still even possible.
My parents' home phone used to receive several scam calls a week from India. There was no way to stop them short of giving up the landline, which is what I did.
I can't believe phone companies (in the UK) don't provide better protection, even a registry of whitelisted numbers, that could be set for the old/vulnerable.
Well, I am in and from India, and I receive several scam calls a month from India.
Indians, by number of victims, are the biggest victims of Indian scammers. Several people I know personally have been burned.
Our phone numbers are in several lists, and they get leaked.
I think one solution to this is strict data privacy laws. If there is a list with phone numbers/addresses, it should be subject to highest level of care and security. Or there should be laws banning collection of phone numbers unless absolutely needed.
No amount of spreading awareness seems to work. The local law enforcement of the exact two states in India where the domestic scammers are from are also "involved".
I live in Germany, famous for having among the strictest privacy laws.
I still get occasional scam calls a few times each month, often using mobile phone numbers or fraudulent VOIP numbers registered in Austria. They usually hang up as soon as you push back on their claim that they got the phone number "from the database, maybe you participated in a contest once" when prompted with the question of how they got your number. The callers are mostly women with Eastern European accents.
I suspect my number ended up in a list when it was leaked in a Facebook data leak because I had to connect it once for account recovery/verification.
They were with Virgin Media and the calls came from UK-looking non withheld numbers, so it wasn't particularly useful. BT and Sky's offerings look better, but you'd hope this kind of thing was part of the default offering.
On the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, the false positives (and the fallout from it) might outweigh the negatives: imagine a volunteer doctor who disappears in West Africa due to being kidnapped/robbed etc and someone local tries to contact the family back home, but all the messages end up getting blocked.
Something simple like a face match or even an email unlock if you connect to the account from an unusual location should work. A lot of websites do that already. So a volunteer doctor from the US opens their phone in Lagos, gets challenged, answers, Meta now knows that Nigerian IPs or whatever VPN they use are fine.
It's not the kidnappers trying to contact the family in this case. It's the clinic administrator who doesn't know why their doctor hasn't shown up for a week
This seems like a good idea. The other variation to cover would be "this person appears to be connecting from a known VPN... [insert further explanation/warning here]"
This could all be solved if the OS vendors would add a 'share my childs screen' function to their operating systems. These incidents happen in isolation - make it possible for an adult to actually .. you know .. have oversight over their childrens online activities and it would be less dangerous.
It would also be solved if care takers wouldn't let a child do stuff unsupervised on the internet.
Or if a care taker educated a child about dangers on the internet.
Do you really think care takers would watch their kids screens remotely all the time and then such horrific events wouldn't happen? I think it wouldn't help at all if that feature existed
If Facebook were at all a force for good in this world, maybe I'd agree with you. But given the litany of other social ills they are directly or indirectly responsible for, I'm fairly confident you could nuke them tomorrow and the world would be a better place.
Ironically Onlyfans have really good systems for this. All communication is monitored and any mention of blackmail (including indirect references) will get the sending account banned.
The blackmail risk is actually fairly balanced between content creators and subscribers. If you look on Twitter for example, you'll see loads of adult content creators blackmailing their customers.
AFAIK Onlyfans doesn't directly purse blackmail cases with its own legal teams, it just bans accounts.
> Are they supposed to monitor the content of the chats? Some would call that eavesdropping.
FWIW, if the goal is to detect potential scam/abuse scenarios and offer help, then nowadays, they could train a ML classifier and have it run locally. If the conversation gets classified as highly suspect, the app could pop up some "this looks suspect, if you need help press HERE to share the conversation with us" warning. Privacy concerns would go away entirely, if nothing is actually reported to the mothership until the user specifically reports a conversation.
There's only so much they can do for users behind their backs, and a lot of that is undesirable unless you trust the company to be benevolent; local classifiers popping up recommendations could, however, help users help themselves.
You can easily inform the end user, so the conversation is transparent and the victim is giving implicit, informed consent.
"NOTICE: The user appears to be in XXX, Nigeria. The User's hometown and usual IP is XXX , USA. Beware of scams or impersonations by people hijacking your friend's accounts"
But Social media companies would never do this because it would destroy their so called "brand-trust"
I work for IPinfo, where we provide a VPN detection service. Some people think that our VPN detection service restricts access to various services through a VPN. However, if someone is paying for their internet and then chooses to pay an additional $15-$20 a month for a VPN service, it is likely to be a source of good traffic.
From the point of Facebook, I think they use SMS verification and their app also requires location permission. Facebook is pretty good at preventing bad signups. What they need to do is invest that effort in keeping their user base safe.
There are databases sold by the likes of Maxmind to identify a lot of the common VPNs so this could also be detected. Of course it's a game of cat and mouse but still better than nothing.
You don’t get to say “we will read your messages to sell ads, we will straight up sell your message history to other companies, but no we can’t do anything to protect users from trivially detectable scams.
> Are they supposed to monitor the content of the chats? Some would call that eavesdropping.
I rather assumed they already did monitor chat, in order to target adverts, A/B test, handle abuse reports, filter spam, etc.
Even if FB says it has "end to end encryption", I can't fully believe them due to the political pressure under the banner "terrorism/kids get hurt" is immense regardless of us here regarding that as thought terminating cliché from the intelligence agencies.
The victim's parents would technically have been guilty of a felony if this happened today, by failing to lock up the firearm and the minor causing injury to another, including their own self [1]. Michigan's safe storage law was not in effect in 2022, but the truth stands that guns really need to be locked up when there are teens around. For some reason the narrative has been on 6-year-olds accidentally picking up a gun, but that type of accidental child firearm death is absolutely dwarfed by teen firearm suicides.
I'm not real confident this is solvable with law enforcement in a world where the police press release is - "located in a slum in Nigeria with a population of 25 million people"
Sure it is. If a country can’t find and enforce a law or extradite someone for doing such a thing, order the carrier of the extortion messages to block the entire country or charge the message carrier itself, especially if minors are involved.
Like if Facebook is being a safe haven for Nigerian extortionists, either they block Nigeria or Australia blocks Facebook.
Even assuming this is technically feasible (a premise others don't believe), it is ethically wrong to cut off an entire country from the Internet because a small portion of the population are committing crimes.
Imagine a large American city getting cut off from Facebook because there are many people selling shoplifted items on FB Marketplace and your underfunded govt doesn't have the financial ability to crack down on them. The average person would lose all contact with friends and family because some people are using a service to commit crimes.
There's a right to life, there's no right to social media.
I think it's fine to cut off FB entirely in response… but then, I also think FB monetised what was previously free, collecting rent on being social, and as such everyone will be better off if it gets blocked in their area.
Including the advertisers. Sales can't exceed global income, so at this point the extra ad slots being forced everywhere only serve to make the advertisers part of a Nash game to spend ever more to fight each other for the same potential reward.
They're describing a border. When I was a teen in the late 90s, the internet without borders was cool (until I wandered into trolls I didn't have the resilience to deal with), but very obviously not compatible with national sovereignty on what counted as "illegal".
Now? Does any country today block zero domains? There's nearly 200 nations so I've never bothered to check, but my guess is all block something.
You think that argument stops at Facebook? Why won't it apply to the VPNs people use to get around the geofencing on Facebook, to all the other social media platforms, to all messaging services, and so on? Now you've blocked huge swaths of services and fragmented all the platforms.
I think, if The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was remade today, the quote would be:
"…an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think social media is a pretty neat idea."
Honestly, maybe it’s time to consider that. Saying “oh well, let’s give up on laws because the internet is worldwide and unlimited” doesn’t feel like a good choice to me.
We have very strong checks on people using roads to cross borders.
I suspect that the same will eventually apply to IP traffic crossing borders. Big companies like google, netflix, meta etc will be approved by default, but anything else will be blocked.
We know how to pretty effectively police roads, but a surprising number of people here seem to think that any amount of internet regulation is impossible. If it's so harmful _and also_ difficult to police, then it's not unreasonable to ask how much death and destruction is too much, is it?
Unless, of course, "it's so hard to regulate" is just a thought-terminating cliché because the SV set also benefits from lax internet laws. But I'm sure it can't be that, no...
I mean we do cut off entire countries and their citizens from global markets and from traveling when they do shit like invading their sovereign neighbors and that is completely fine and even desirable. Why can’t we (morally) cut them off also from infecting our Internet? Fuck them. Fix your country then come back and we will reevaluate.
> I mean we do cut off entire countries and their citizens from global markets and from traveling when they do shit like invading their sovereign neighbors and that is completely fine and even desirable.
It's actually not completely fine. Sanctions are effectively an act of war, just instead of shooting people and risking your own troops, you have your enemy's civilian population starve and shoot each other. This can be justified in some situations, possibly like the one you refer to; but it's definitely not an action to take lightly.
Ironically, in the originally proposed case of blocking Facebook, this is a bit of a "cut off your nose to spite your face" situation. How many small and medium businesses rely on Facebook as their main, or only, customer acquisition, communication and/or sales channel? For many countries, banning Facebook out of the blue would cause some serious economic issues and lead to plenty of actual suffering of innocent people.
(And yes, businesses will adapt, but let's not forget that adaptation in nature only ever means that the survivors of a mass die-off have more resources to use to bounce back. And it's the "die-off" part that's actually the necessary part.)
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that a teenager that is willing to invest time into setting up a VPN so that they can talk to Nigerians probably isn't the sort of teenager to have this kind of problem.
We let people fly to countries without extradition orders. VPNs can be seen just like that: crossing the digital border. But for a company operating in a nation, it makes sense to impose regulation.
I'm going out on a different limb and suggest that a scammer that is unable to invest time into setting up a VPN so that they can talk to teenagers outside of Nigeria probably isn't the sort of scammer that causes this kind of problem.
"Don't bother enforcing laws because people try to break them" is an express ticket to a Mad Max world. It's also not a particularly interesting or practical solution, and honestly comes off as a little disingenuous.
Then blackhole the VPNs when they're involved in crime and make them share legal financial responsibility for the crimes they enable.
Eventually you keep walking down this line until you write laws that local ISPs are required to globally blackhole countries which otherwise evade law enforcement.
I can make a VPN for like 3 euro on AWS (thinking about it, I can probably do it with their free tier offer). I could probably do the same for a bit more work and study on most PaaS.
It is called a scam because that's what the perps are going for. Their goal is to extract money. From the article: "The price was $300. He transferred the money via Apple Cash and pleaded to be left alone. But it wasn’t enough. Now Dani wanted $800."
Maybe you know different teenagers than me, but I'm not expecting that the boys described here would be big on joining a rape support group.
I would describe that as blackmail. The legal term is different but its a serious crime and should be a police matter. The problem is victims may be scared or ashamed of reporting it to the police. In some places they may be guilty of a crime too.
There should be support. I suspect there are sources of support but a victim of this may not think of looking of this.
Blackmail is how it ends up, yes, but the blackmail material is created through fraud, and the goal from the start is to extract money through trickery, so that part's a scam.
Intentions of attackers are irrelevant, important is what they do! Victims are not killing themselves over $300, but over revenge porn!
I would absolutely join rape support group, but there are none for men. Maybe the is the real problem. At least they should get break from school, or help with relocation!
And correct labeling would help with school bullies. Reposting some "scam" pictures has zero punishment, spreading revenge porn on other side...
Reposting dick pics of exes, or groups like "Are we dating the same guy?" are sadly way too common!
It's true that scammers use many different techniques, and I agree that NCP is in play here. But something can be more than one thing at once. This is a scam.
I'm not tone policing anything, bub. As Carrie Goldberg says, "NONCONSENSUAL PORNOGRAPHY IS SEXUAL ABUSE". [1] So I agree with that part.
But NCP is used in all sorts of ways. One of those ways, this particular way here, is as part of a scam. And I think it's important to keep that in mind because to be effective fighting crime, you have to understand it. Anti-scam education is also an important component of online safety training. So when you say, "Why is it called 'scam' and 'fraud'?" as if that were somehow incorrect, I'm going to explain why it's correct.
No, it isn't typical, you are confusing "revenge" with "extortion."
The scammers aren't doing it because they are jilted lovers, obsessed stalkers, or even just bullies: They set out from the very beginning to create a relationship to extort cash.
"Typical" revenge porn, as far as I am aware, overwhelmingly has women victims. That is also why many victim networks are by and for women. It's also, as far as I know, rare for the "typical" case to be linked to extortion.
Pay wall but making some quick assumption this is people who are impersonating girls/guys which lures young guys with sending nudes and then proclaims that their nudes will be sent everywhere maybe even used to be sent to women/young girls so that when the authorities crackfown it'll be the young guy facing the crime, but this can all be averted by the victim paying.
I.e. extortion.
Beyond it being a truly despicable crime, it's interesting how this extortion hadn't changed much since the early 2000s the only difference is that it's done on a larger scale and probably more done for money than for other nefarious reasons.
Bit different imo. If some scammer sends me my bro's penile pic, I'm gonna delete it and warn him. If the scammer sends me proof he was consuming illegal, immoral CSAM, I'm having a vastly different reaction.
The shame is the key to this scam. The intersection of (especially teenaged) insecurity, and America cultures nonsensical relationship to sex and shame, is tragic.
That's arguably kind of a weak twist ending to that episode; it would actually basically still work if the material had been inoffensive. Throughout the episode, the viewer is meant to _assume_ it's just shame.
Yes, this is maybe something that is true that we can tell victims of this scam/attack: If I get an anonymous mail with a picture of any sort, I'm not going to look at it. No matter what they say it is. This goes for other platforms too.
There are fortunately few ways for random strangers to cram images I don't want to see into my eyes. Most of the ones that do exist (e.g. making a social media profile and trying to "add" me) are automatically scanned for porn by the social network site.
Teenage boys won't necessarily know the distinction between what's shameful and what's illegal, or the bigger political beliefs around CSAM. Don't you think you're perpetuating the fear of sexuality by effectively threating to cause serious harm to teenagers for looking at the wrong kinds of pictures? Why is there such a binary classification of "no shame" and "calling the cops"? Different countries' laws put that distinction in different places. Remember this could be a minor himself who hasn't actually done any harm to anyone.
I don't think you should've been downvoted, I reread my comment last night and realized I didn't make it as clear.
I mentioned that shame (of sexuality/nudity/vulgarity) as a contrast to fear of being caught doing something illegal, because I think we should work to remove that shame. Or at least that magnitude of it.
I have my own relationship and journey with this American-puritanical bs shame. Life's short, lots of people are horny, no one really cares about your junk that much anyway. But yeah, I didn't have any of that perspective as a teenager.
I kind of agree with the shame thing. It is a problem and puts people at risk of this sort of extortion. On the other hand, what's the alternative? Without shame or laws, would we end up with a lot of public exhibitionism? Would that be fine because nobody has any strong feelings about it? If society became like that, would it devalue sex and reduce many people's enjoyment of it? I suppose one advantage is that sexual abuse of children would be nearly impossible by definition, and in practice because those children would themselves already be desensitized to it. Perhaps this is one of those difficult areas where personal freedom impacts general long term wellbeing of society in a subtle and vague way.
And how exactly is a local cop in the US supposed to enforce the law against someone who (both legally and physically) is a resident of a country on the other side of the globe (Nigeria)?
Asking because that’s the situation the article in the OP is talking about, and I don’t see how any of what you said applies to it.
> And how exactly is a local cop in the US supposed to enforce the law against someone who (both legally and physically) is a resident of a country on the other side of the globe (Nigeria)?
> Asking because that’s the situation the article in the OP is talking about, and I don’t see how any of what you said applies to it.
The perpetrator I am thinking of was a foreign national, but was a student in the USA, attending a US university.
Eh yes, and no. A lot of precincts don't have cybercrime resources and can't do much. Especially in the US, you'd be surprised at how little cooperation different agencies have.
Best to contact a cyber division of some sort, especially sexual harassment task forces and non-profits. They're usually able to get the ball moving. Local PDs, especially in Metro areas, simply don't have the resources. It's a sad reality.
https://archive.ph/I9jm2
A. My understanding is an underage teen who takes a nude selfie and sends it can be charged with distributing "child porn." This is a serious problem and should not be true. If other people forward it, they should be charged, but a teenager should not get in legal trouble for making a nude selfie and sending it privately.
B. We need to culturally get over a lot of our hangups about certain things. His girlfriend was attending church. The church should be telling kids "This is not worth killing yourself over."
C. We somehow need to come up with reasonable accommodation for the reality that teens have phones and budding sexualities and these two things are colliding horrifically in a legal and cultural system strongly rooted in assuming "child porn" is made solely by abusive adults and not willingly by underage teens who don't think it's a big deal at the time the photo is snapped.
Taking a nude selfie should be safer than baring your body in person. No risk of STDs or pregnancy are involved. And yet we've turned it into this hugely dangerous thing for anyone who hasn't spent years thinking about sexual morality who isn't prepared to say to law enforcement and the world "Nudes of me? Big fucking deal."
No idea how to further any of those things, but this is hardly the first article I've read about teen selfies being involved in extreme levels of harsh consequences that I just think morally should not happen and I think have roots in cultural and legal stuff going bad places in part because we aren't keeping up with the times.
It's not just the CSAM aspect, it's the whole idea that sex ed is grooming. It's like the difference between saying "you shouldn't have sex until you are a responsible adult" vs "I honestly don't recommend that you have sex at this age, but if you do, here's how to do it safely and responsibly".
Teaching kids "don't send naked pictures of yourself to other people" is one thing, but if they look around and see their peers sext with each other with no real repercussions, this warning will fall on deaf ears. They will file it next to "don't drink until you're 21".
On the other hand, if you start tailoring this message into something like, "sexting is a bad idea, don't do it, especially if you don't know the other person or don't trust them 100%; if you do sext, here's how to minimize the impact of cyberbullying or blackmail: ...", then people will loudly complain that schools are teaching their children how to sext.
I homeschooled my kids, so school-based sex education doesn't really make my radar.
It's all very alien to me how teaching safe practice of something that has a huge probability of happening can still be seen as encouraging it, "grooming". Education should be a bare minimum here: here's how your body works, here's your risk of becoming/making your partner pregnant (and what that entails for you), of catching a life-long disease, cancer, or a nasty painful thing, here's what medical science and the FDA says you can both use as contraceptive and their failure rate and side effects, no means fricking no, and all of this compounds if you drink or do drugs...
Not teaching this amounts to not preparing your kid for the actual world and reduces body autonomy and responsible behaviour... They will experiment, and they will do stupid things.
It's as if teaching civics was a gateway to anarchist bombing or teaching chemistry a gateway to Breaking Bad... American puritanism and the whole "teaching is grooming" is such a weird thing.
What about the toxic masculinity culture taught by the right and the church? The right says, "keep these women under control." The church says,"women MUST obey their husbands no matter what." If that's not grooming, I don't know what is.
We home schooled our children. We made sure our kids knew what could happen in life because we are all flawed and sometimes make decisions that could be life altering in unintended ways. We knew that we couldn't educate them enough about the variables of life, but we tried.
> The church says,"women MUST obey their husbands no matter what."
Which church exactly says that? Only a fringe group of American evangelicals. I have never come across even them saying "no matter what" although there are probably a few real lunatics who do.
Here is the view of the the largest Christian church, that submission in marriage is mutual: https://www.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/apost_exhor... (page 115)
Many evangelical fundamentalist churches, for example, use the material from The Institute in Basic Life Principles. On marriage it says,"A husband's authority over his wife is God-given, as is his wife's non-negotiable duty to submit to him; she must respect his position regardless of his "deficiencies".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_in_Basic_Life_Princi...
There seems to be a lot of (new?) confusion between pedophiles and adults being interested in sexually mature teenagers, which, sure, can cause it's own issues, but is neither a sickness nor a one-way street, and that's what the different majorities of consent and authority and being able to interact with adult industries are for.
And the cutoff for turning fully major and being able to still interact with your slightly younger peers has to be dealt with anyway, ideally in a progressive way.
There are multiple ways of dealing with it. Romeo and Juliet style age of consent laws for example. Not treating teenagers who do something stupid the same way as adults who distribute child porn.
But it takes some serious mental resilience to contemplate that as a teenager when someone is threatening to send your nudes to the people you love. Not many kids are going to have that kind of intestinal fortitude.
The tendency of porn to give men severe anxiety about their genitals is playing into this; kids are more embarrassed/ashamed about their bodies because all the other penises they've seen are so huge.
We need to get really cool about a whole bunch of stuff really quickly if we're going to make this (and other problems) go away. I don't think AI is going to be part of that.
And this is the problem. In years past kids would be naked with other kids, when changing after gym for example. Nowadays the only penis a boy sees is his own and that of porn people, because we've made normal nude situations extremely rare, especially outside of the context of sex.
On the other hand, bodies change over time, so it gets easier to say "That 10 year old pic? No, not real."
(Unless it's extremely attractive. Then enthuse about how gorgeous you once were, I guess, and see if people buy that.)
I think the problem is knowing what to do preemptively (which affects everyone who might help, not just the church). I am sure that if they asked a priest/paster/whatever they would be told that.
What can you do if they do not ask for. Preach a sermon on this specific problem? There are many variants and you need to get the message across. Maybe a general sermon on the risk of blackmail in general, and talking about where victims can get help, explaining the blackmailer is doing something wrong.
I think parents have a critical role to play. Talk about things like staying safe online, not trusting people, the fact that people assume false identities.
I know my teenage daughter does not disclose her real identity online. I have spoken to her about the dangers of doing so. I will give this as an example, not because I am worried that exactly the same thing would happen, but as an example of the general sort of things that happen. It might be something you say rather than a selfie, for example.
> Taking a nude selfie should be safer than baring your body in person. No risk of STDs or pregnancy are involved. And yet we've turned it into this hugely dangerous thing for anyone who hasn't spent years thinking about sexual morality who isn't prepared to say to law enforcement and the world "Nudes of me? Big fucking deal."
I agree. The law and culture is badly out of date.
It’s more complicated than that. Due to a new law in Germany, a teacher getting to know that these images are floating around and forwarding them to the respective parent could be charged for distributing child porn.
I don't actually want to see my sons naked, thanks. They hit puberty, suddenly discovered the concept of privacy and I have no idea what their private parts look like.
That’s an insane overreach which could easily lead to abuse, they shouldn’t be accessing children’s phones, especially under the premise of ‘I need that image for safeguarding purposes’ - absolutely fucking not.
By accident? The teacher and the and the other teen have the same first or last name, or the next one in the contact list, or the autofill rearranged just before clicking, or just one missclick... there are so many ways it could have happened.
Not to mention your absolute stretch of a scenario. Do kids typically have their teachers phone numbers in their contacts? Have them added on Facebook? Follow them on Insta? These are all genuine safeguarding issues in themselves, imo (granted I haven’t been in school for 10-15 years). I feel you’re being disingenuous here.
> It’s more complicated than that. Due to a new law in Germany, a teacher getting to know that these images are floating around and forwarding them to the respective parent could be charged for distributing child porn.
I was only adressing how this hypothetical teacher could have had access to it, not what they should do about it, since you were making very strong suppositions about it.
> Do kids typically have their teachers phone numbers in their contacts? Have them added on Facebook? Follow them on Insta?
Is it that rare for some teacher (even in high school) to receive some of their students work online? And didn't the Covid situation with remote classes, Zoom, etc, made it possible for such a thing (students having some way of contacting their teachers online) to be way more common now than before?
Anyway, not sure anything I can say could change your mind.
Edit: About what should the teacher do in that case, this was my assumption, I may be wrong, but I think when @pflenker was mentionning this law, they only tried to put it in a scenario in relation with the thread were we could think that child pronography wasn't involved, similar to when @DoreenMichele was mentionning the fact that a teenager sharing (with consent) a nude with other teenagers should not be charged and labeled as CP.
>Is it that rare for some teacher (even in high school) to receive some of their students work online?
It's been a while, but when I worked in the education sector we had systems for students to upload their work, get graded, feedback, reports etc. Yeah, you could upload .pngs and .jpgs but it's hardly 'the next contact in the list' or 'maybe they had the same first or last name' in those scenarios, you upload the work for specific classes/courses. Obviously that's a single system, I don't know the full scope of what schools use these days.
> Anyway, not sure anything I can say could change your mind.
No, nothing will change my mind that forwarding nude pictures of minors to literally anyone other than a law enforcement case handler is acceptable.
As you (unintentionally) point out, there's money to be made/data to be acquired in Education. A few years ago, before Covid, one of my siblings had to use a cloud offering because of school. I forgot which, Microsoft Team for Education maybe, or Facebook Education Groups. I just remember being disapointed. People are use to their interface, and they have the money to lobby and ads, easier to sell something "free" with easy onboarding to schools administrators.
I presume it’s a very difficult market to break into though for various reasons, a lot of which tech won’t solve any time soon, to the detriment of our new generations.
Edit: wait, Facebook education groups? Is this a thing that schools run, or something else?
Who made the case it was acceptable?
Granted, in this case I agree that it's better judgment not to forward the picture for all the reasons you've mentioned - but calling it insane is a bit much.
If you're a teacher, it would be wise to assume the parents may be in some way part of the problem.
If you're a teacher coming up with excuses to share nudes of your students with other people, you are at risk of being investigated very seriously as a potential child molester or distributor of child porn.
This is a minefield for a teacher and I don't think it's really a stretch to say it's "insane" or "extremely stupid" or other similarly strong language.
It has bad idea written all over it in blinking neon letters.
(And that's part of the reason why some of the ways in which parts of society react to these things is so problematic. If you're reacting that strongly to something that most likely is just the result of naivety, then frankly you have a much stronger claim to being insane than the person who's being naive.)
But your intuition is pretty much spot-on with the training I have received.
Sending a nude photo of a child to the child’s parents is absolutely beyond any form of rationality. Discuss the concern with the parents, inform the police, get them to verify that their little angel did in fact take nudes and send them around.
It’s literally forwarding CP. Let the authorities deal with this, if the parent wants to see their kids nudes then… well, I don’t really know what to say other than let the authorities deal with it. They can show them for verification purposes or something, without sending this image to any more devices than it needs to exist on.
The police and social services, along with school district policy, will advise the next steps, including how parents are informed.
They (us) don't have full control in later teens, but everything leading up to it, mostly yes. But for every parent I see raising kids the hard way (tons of time spent together consistently every day, being a positive role model, motivating and supporting them in all the right directions while explaining in detail the rest), I see the other way (obsessed by their pathetic office careers, kids with phones/screens from very early age that then go mental if they have to spend weekend without them, parents addicted to their phones/other screens too, overweight, depressed, without any real healthy passion(s) in their lives).
The results, I mean the kids, always show how parenting went (barring say some inborne mental issues and traumatic accidents, that I have no right to comment on).
I'd say this leans much more heavily on father too, like it or not. Mother is a safe haven and initial care and nurture, but father is a) hardcore role model for the boys, and b) a template what to look for in partners later for girls. Yeah, missing dad syndrome is brutal, every single effin' time, best mothers do minimize this and thats about it. I don't like it, its deeply unfair, not sure to whom to complain to.
Yet your comment reminds me of be the modern opposite take on parental responsibility: blame most everything on childhood trauma, and blame trauma on the parents.
We used to blame autism on mothers.
Seriously, we make as much sense as our ancestors blaming miasma for sickness. Remember the hellscape fad of recovering repressed memories? There are people that blame trauma on their past lives!
We all literally have no idea about any of this: our best bet is to be non-judgemental, do our best to create good communities, and to accept our own ignorance.
> The results, I mean the kids, always show how parenting went
Why is this such a common way to think?
Personally some of the worst things I have done I have learnt from my peers. My middle-class innocent parents are not to blame.
> Mother is a safe haven and initial care and nurture
I think stereotypes are dangerous. I'm middle-aged and while we can make generalisations about mothers and fathers, I've learnt that those generalisations can't be applied to individual mothers and fathers.
And conversing about this is just plain hard. I definitely don't want to attack you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35576696
Anyways: To my best knowledge I've really veered off the path - please don't delve into my comment too far. Black and white thinking can be a problem and I'm just as guilty of that as anybody: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
That idea is pure revisionism coming from individualist ideology.
In 'those' days, everybody raised everyone. 'It takes a village' and all that. Check any actual scientific research on the matter.
Currently, the Catholic church has a track record of de facto aiding and abetting child molesting priests. I think there's room for improvement.
It's a really, really brave teenager that's going to be able to front up with naked photos sent to his parents and friends and say "they're fake". And, of course, if they're not fake and one person finds out, everyone will know soon enough. This kind of stuff is what teenage drama is made of.
From the article: the photo included his pyjamas, which matched hers. How is an AI going to know the exact pattern of pyjamas he wore? It might, but even asking that question is a problem if you're the victim.
I don't think ignoring the problem and telling the victim to toughen up is helping.
Claim the AI saw a picture of your pyjamas? But ye, people are bad at lying. It would be enough to claim they don't know how the AI made the picture.
Anyone can write absolutely anything with little check and balance on substance, and MILLIONS still believe tabloids and headlines. We've been able to reliably edit photos/video/film for 80 years with an exponential increase in its efficiency within the last 30 - and we still have millions that would take a photo or video's substance at face-value.
It was shared on social media just before elections during 'moratorium' [0]. There was no time or place to dismiss it by mainstream.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence
The scams are real, the victims are real, it's in the global "west" and sorely under reported and the conveyors (Facebook, Twitter, etc) have washed their hands of dealing with it:
eg.
Forrest's Facebook fight dropped by Australian prosecutors https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/forres...
Australian victim of fraud syndicate advertising on Facebook on a mission to stop others being burned https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-15/australians-falling-f...The realism of deepfake video with real known public figures apparently endorsing investments as "safe" is another level past Nigerian prince scams.
1- https://time.com/6513036/robocalls-government-action/
All of those scams work perfectly fine, that's what they're still around. Money lost through scams is only increasing; it's a growth market.
Even if they had your actual real nudes, you not replying might even make a real scammer go "shit they don't check their messages", and move to the next target.
"Meta has a portal for police to file requests to preserve records of accounts connected to criminal investigations. Like other social media companies, it has to hold the records—including emails, IP addresses, message transcripts and general usage history—for 90 days. It only hands over user data if it’s ordered to do so by a court.
There’s one way to expedite the request: file it as an emergency, meaning a child could be harmed or there’s risk of death. Larson believed this case qualified. He told Meta that a 17-year-old was already dead, and there was a high probability other kids were in danger, too.
*Meta declined his request within an hour, he says. “The request you submitted does not rise to the level of an emergency,” the company responded.*"
Also iMessage really does not seem to be well designed to handle abuse. Your only option is to block, which is a couple of taps away from a conversation. The block does not instantly take effect cross device, so you still get messages on your Apple Watch until you reboot it. Your only option for reporting anything is when deleting a conversation, and all you can do is say it’s spam.
He called in a panic and I told him to ignore it. Nothing ever came of it (because in this case, how could it - and we're both adults, I convinced him even if it were true why would it matter - again, highly case specific but he agreed it wouldnt).
I doubt the same would be true in all cases, just wanted to share.
If people were all that good at being rational about safety in the face of possible sexytimes, it's true this wouldn't happen. And we wouldn't have STDs or unintended pregnancies, either. But as the man says, life finds a way.
My first assumption would be the "girl" is a bot and the image generated by AI until proven otherwise, i.e. by meeting up at a public location and seeing it's a real person from my country. Am I too paranoid? It sure feels like the dead internet theory is just about to get real and we should act accordingly.
People who are exposed to this line of thinking will now be doubly ashamed if they fall for this, making them even less likely to ask for help.
There's a real world parallel in Search and Rescue operations that I'm personally familiar with: https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2021/01/17/shaming-those-who-n...
But... WHY?! You're not The Rock. Unless you're ripped and/or packing, the chances of your "nudes" sent in reply scaring the recipient away are pretty high.
No. Apparently it also happens with british Member of Parliament. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/04/senior-tory...
(1) Most young people are insecure as anything and have unhealthy self-esteem.
(2) Culturally the west is very (and I mean very) ashamed of nudity.
Problem (1) isn't something that can be done half-assed. The kid will need a healthy family, friends, support system. They will need to be free of traumatic influences... While (2) I see as being more practical.
If you look at European countries they are much more naturalist regarding nudity. Like Dutch have their Freikörperkultur (FKK) free body movement where there's many places where you can go and do activities nude. Mixed gender saunas where people are naked are common. Then there's Japan where parents commonly bathe with their children. It teaches them not to be ashamed of their body.
We don't really have anything like that in the west. It's really quite dangerous because its just like: do we expect literal teenagers to practice good opsec when adults can't even get that shit right?
I can't believe phone companies (in the UK) don't provide better protection, even a registry of whitelisted numbers, that could be set for the old/vulnerable.
Indians, by number of victims, are the biggest victims of Indian scammers. Several people I know personally have been burned.
Our phone numbers are in several lists, and they get leaked.
I think one solution to this is strict data privacy laws. If there is a list with phone numbers/addresses, it should be subject to highest level of care and security. Or there should be laws banning collection of phone numbers unless absolutely needed.
No amount of spreading awareness seems to work. The local law enforcement of the exact two states in India where the domestic scammers are from are also "involved".
I still get occasional scam calls a few times each month, often using mobile phone numbers or fraudulent VOIP numbers registered in Austria. They usually hang up as soon as you push back on their claim that they got the phone number "from the database, maybe you participated in a contest once" when prompted with the question of how they got your number. The callers are mostly women with Eastern European accents.
I suspect my number ended up in a list when it was leaked in a Facebook data leak because I had to connect it once for account recovery/verification.
https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/cordless-phones/article/how-...
By all accounts the Dr would probably be in better shape if the kidnappers weren’t able to contact their family.
Because there are some criminals in a geographical area you want to exclude the whole area? Why don't you demand a US-only internet instead?
"NOTICE: The user appears to be in XXX, Nigeria. Beware of scams or impersonations by people hijacking your friend's accounts"
But Social media companies would never do this because it would destroy their so called "brand-trust"
Or if a care taker educated a child about dangers on the internet.
Do you really think care takers would watch their kids screens remotely all the time and then such horrific events wouldn't happen? I think it wouldn't help at all if that feature existed
And, I would definitely have caught things sooner if I'd had that ability. (Disclaimer: yes, we have been victims of these kinds of scams.)
Are they supposed to monitor the content of the chats? Some would call that eavesdropping.
The sad fact is that desperate people exist. And these desperate people are willing to do despicable things to make a buck.
So "Facebook should abort itself" is one option.
AFAIK Onlyfans doesn't directly purse blackmail cases with its own legal teams, it just bans accounts.
FWIW, if the goal is to detect potential scam/abuse scenarios and offer help, then nowadays, they could train a ML classifier and have it run locally. If the conversation gets classified as highly suspect, the app could pop up some "this looks suspect, if you need help press HERE to share the conversation with us" warning. Privacy concerns would go away entirely, if nothing is actually reported to the mothership until the user specifically reports a conversation.
There's only so much they can do for users behind their backs, and a lot of that is undesirable unless you trust the company to be benevolent; local classifiers popping up recommendations could, however, help users help themselves.
"NOTICE: The user appears to be in XXX, Nigeria. The User's hometown and usual IP is XXX , USA. Beware of scams or impersonations by people hijacking your friend's accounts"
But Social media companies would never do this because it would destroy their so called "brand-trust"
Another user noted that OnlyFans is analyzing text and bans anyone saying anything approaching blackmail.
Odd (but maybe not odd at all) to think that OnlyFans might be the leader on this.
But if you can prevent script kiddies, why not? The current barrier to entry is so damn low. Paying VPN is indeed a barrier to entry.
From the point of Facebook, I think they use SMS verification and their app also requires location permission. Facebook is pretty good at preventing bad signups. What they need to do is invest that effort in keeping their user base safe.
You don’t get to say “we will read your messages to sell ads, we will straight up sell your message history to other companies, but no we can’t do anything to protect users from trivially detectable scams.
They used to actually sell your days to select groups.
Now they sell advertiser ads based on your data but the advertiser does not get to see said data.
I rather assumed they already did monitor chat, in order to target adverts, A/B test, handle abuse reports, filter spam, etc.
Even if FB says it has "end to end encryption", I can't fully believe them due to the political pressure under the banner "terrorism/kids get hurt" is immense regardless of us here regarding that as thought terminating cliché from the intelligence agencies.
[1] https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/-/media/Project/Websites/mdhh...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-68720247
I'm not real confident this is solvable with law enforcement in a world where the police press release is - "located in a slum in Nigeria with a population of 25 million people"
Like if Facebook is being a safe haven for Nigerian extortionists, either they block Nigeria or Australia blocks Facebook.
Imagine a large American city getting cut off from Facebook because there are many people selling shoplifted items on FB Marketplace and your underfunded govt doesn't have the financial ability to crack down on them. The average person would lose all contact with friends and family because some people are using a service to commit crimes.
I think it's fine to cut off FB entirely in response… but then, I also think FB monetised what was previously free, collecting rent on being social, and as such everyone will be better off if it gets blocked in their area.
Including the advertisers. Sales can't exceed global income, so at this point the extra ad slots being forced everywhere only serve to make the advertisers part of a Nash game to spend ever more to fight each other for the same potential reward.
Said country affected can sign an extradition treaty to restore access.
Now? Does any country today block zero domains? There's nearly 200 nations so I've never bothered to check, but my guess is all block something.
Banning a company from doing business with a country is called "sanctions", not "war", and sanctions happen a lot.
Facebook making money off of illegal activity conveniently hidden behind national borders is not the cornerstone of the Internet.
"…an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think social media is a pretty neat idea."
I suspect that the same will eventually apply to IP traffic crossing borders. Big companies like google, netflix, meta etc will be approved by default, but anything else will be blocked.
Unless, of course, "it's so hard to regulate" is just a thought-terminating cliché because the SV set also benefits from lax internet laws. But I'm sure it can't be that, no...
It's actually not completely fine. Sanctions are effectively an act of war, just instead of shooting people and risking your own troops, you have your enemy's civilian population starve and shoot each other. This can be justified in some situations, possibly like the one you refer to; but it's definitely not an action to take lightly.
Ironically, in the originally proposed case of blocking Facebook, this is a bit of a "cut off your nose to spite your face" situation. How many small and medium businesses rely on Facebook as their main, or only, customer acquisition, communication and/or sales channel? For many countries, banning Facebook out of the blue would cause some serious economic issues and lead to plenty of actual suffering of innocent people.
(And yes, businesses will adapt, but let's not forget that adaptation in nature only ever means that the survivors of a mass die-off have more resources to use to bounce back. And it's the "die-off" part that's actually the necessary part.)
We let people fly to countries without extradition orders. VPNs can be seen just like that: crossing the digital border. But for a company operating in a nation, it makes sense to impose regulation.
Eventually you keep walking down this line until you write laws that local ISPs are required to globally blackhole countries which otherwise evade law enforcement.
Residential VPNs exist, but they cost money and increase the barrier for entry, while also being a choke point for abuse.
There is a strong network to support rape victims, and it should be used for such cases.
Maybe you know different teenagers than me, but I'm not expecting that the boys described here would be big on joining a rape support group.
There should be support. I suspect there are sources of support but a victim of this may not think of looking of this.
I would absolutely join rape support group, but there are none for men. Maybe the is the real problem. At least they should get break from school, or help with relocation!
And correct labeling would help with school bullies. Reposting some "scam" pictures has zero punishment, spreading revenge porn on other side...
Reposting dick pics of exes, or groups like "Are we dating the same guy?" are sadly way too common!
Perhaps it is scam and revenge porn at the same time! And $300 scam is the smaller part! There are many precedents, but with girls!
This tone policing "men can never be a victim of a sexual crime" is getting old.
But NCP is used in all sorts of ways. One of those ways, this particular way here, is as part of a scam. And I think it's important to keep that in mind because to be effective fighting crime, you have to understand it. Anti-scam education is also an important component of online safety training. So when you say, "Why is it called 'scam' and 'fraud'?" as if that were somehow incorrect, I'm going to explain why it's correct.
[1] https://www.cagoldberglaw.com/states-with-revenge-porn-laws/
No, it isn't typical, you are confusing "revenge" with "extortion."
The scammers aren't doing it because they are jilted lovers, obsessed stalkers, or even just bullies: They set out from the very beginning to create a relationship to extort cash.
I.e. extortion.
Beyond it being a truly despicable crime, it's interesting how this extortion hadn't changed much since the early 2000s the only difference is that it's done on a larger scale and probably more done for money than for other nefarious reasons.
The shame is the key to this scam. The intersection of (especially teenaged) insecurity, and America cultures nonsensical relationship to sex and shame, is tragic.
There are fortunately few ways for random strangers to cram images I don't want to see into my eyes. Most of the ones that do exist (e.g. making a social media profile and trying to "add" me) are automatically scanned for porn by the social network site.
I mentioned that shame (of sexuality/nudity/vulgarity) as a contrast to fear of being caught doing something illegal, because I think we should work to remove that shame. Or at least that magnitude of it.
I have my own relationship and journey with this American-puritanical bs shame. Life's short, lots of people are horny, no one really cares about your junk that much anyway. But yeah, I didn't have any of that perspective as a teenager.
also UK and US: "We don't even wank to it"
Asking because that’s the situation the article in the OP is talking about, and I don’t see how any of what you said applies to it.
The perpetrator I am thinking of was a foreign national, but was a student in the USA, attending a US university.
The problem is law enforcement.
Best to contact a cyber division of some sort, especially sexual harassment task forces and non-profits. They're usually able to get the ball moving. Local PDs, especially in Metro areas, simply don't have the resources. It's a sad reality.