It’s a noxious smoothie made of some of today's worst internet problems. It’s a new frontier for nonconsensual pornography and fake news alike. (Doctored videos of political candidates saying outlandish things in 3, 2... .) And worst of all? If you live in the United States and someone does this with your face, the law can’t really help you.
To many vulnerable people on the internet, especially women, this looks a whole lot like the end times. “I share your sense of doom,” Mary Anne Franks, who teaches First Amendment and technology law at the University of Miami Law School, and also serves as the tech and legislative policy advisor for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. “I think it is going to be that bad.”
She should know. Franks helped write much of the US’s existing legislation that criminalizes nonconsensual porn—and it's not going to help. It’s not that Franks and lawmakers weren’t thinking about the implications of manipulated images. It’s that the premise of any current legislation is that nonconsensual porn is a privacy violation. Face-swap porn may be deeply, personally humiliating for the people whose likeness is used, but it's technically not a privacy issue. That's because, unlike a nude photo filched from the cloud, this kind of material is bogus. You can’t sue someone for exposing the intimate details of your life when it’s not your life they’re exposing.
And it's the very artifice involved in these videos that provides enormous legal cover for their creators. “It falls through the cracks because it’s all very betwixt and between,” says Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and the author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. “There are all sorts of First Amendment problems because it’s not their real body.” Since US privacy laws don’t apply, taking these videos down could be considered censorship—after all, this is “art” that redditors have crafted, even if it’s unseemly.
more here:
https://www.wired.com/story/face-swap-porn-legal-limbo/
