Google, Amazon, Others Make Money From Scummy “Nudify” Apps
Okay, so you may want to take a shower after reading this, but it is important.
Nudify apps do just that. You upload a picture of someone, say a high school girl you want to bully. Enter your (stolen) credit card. Click a few buttons and you download a deepfake nude image of the picture you just uploaded.
Then you take that fake image and circulate it among your classmates or post it to the Internet. The victim feels ashamed – that they did something wrong. Sometimes it ends in suicide.
So how do we stop it? Follow the money!
Wired did an analysis of 85 of these apps.
Most rely on services from Google, Amazon and Cloudflare, among many other well known Silicon Valley names.
A traffic analysis of this small sample of the total nudify app marketplace said these sites had an average of 18.5 million visitors a month for the last 6 months and may be making $36 million a year.
While it is becoming illegal to create or share explicit deepfakes in some states, you still have to catch people.
If you stop them from making money, for the most part the industry will wither.
That means Amazon has to stop hosting them (62 of the 85 sites used Amazon or Cloudflare). And Google needs to stop giving them sign on services (54 websites).
Then layer on top of that credit card services, social media ads and other services and there is a lot of money for everyone in the food chain. That all needs to stop.
Amazon says that this violates their terms of service and since they were outed in a magazine read by at least tens of millions, we will do a tiny little bit to reign this in.
Google made a similar statement. Some (but I guess not all) of these sites violate our terms and since we don’t like to look bad in main stream media with an audience that pretty much overlaps with our customer base, we are going to “investigate”.
Broadly, the services use AI to transform photos into nonconsensual explicit imagery; they often make money by selling “credits” or subscriptions that can be used to generate photos. They have been supercharged by the wave of generative AI image generators that have appeared in the past few years. Their output is hugely damaging.
Worse yet, getting this stuff off the Internet is damn near impossible.
Most of the visitors to these sites came from the United States, followed by India, Brazil, Mexico and Germany.
Search engines make money helping people find these scummy sites.
Russian hackers make money by standing up fake nudifier sites (assuming that concept doesn’t blow your mind) and lace them with malware. It is hard to feel sorry for the malware victims given what they are doing.
Tech journalists have been telling the tech industry about this for years, but they don’t care. Some of these sites are getting creative by hiding behind relay sites so it is not obvious what the traffic is.
With the new Take it Down Act law, tech companies now have skin in the game, but with only 48 hours after being notified to comply, all requests are going to be considered valid and the content will come down. The law has no appeals process so if your competitor tells your hosting provider to take your content down, unless you can afford expensive lawyers to fight the likes of Google, you are off the air.
What we need is bigger penalties for the companies that allow these scumbags to make money. If it is more expensive in terms of fines for the Googles and Amazons of the world to let these websites operate than to take them down, they will go away. Europe’s idea of a fine as a percentage of your worldwide revenue, sometimes as high as 10 percent, is a strong incentive to get these sites offline.
More states are banning non-consensual deep fakes as well. But it is going to take a concerted effort to kill this industry. Credit: Wired
by 