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Instagram to blur nudity in messages in bid to protect teens | Technology

Instagram to blur nudity in messages in bid to protect teens | Technology

Instagram says it is deploying new tools to protect young people and combat sexual extortion, including a feature that will automatically blur nudity in direct messages.

The social media company said in a blogpost on Thursday that it was testing the features as part of its campaign to fight sexual scams and other forms of “image abuse”, and to make it tougher for criminals to contact teens.

Sexual extortion, or sextortion, involves persuading a person to send explicit photos online and then threatening to make the images public unless the victim pays money or engages in sexual favors. Recent high-profile cases include two Nigerian brothers who pleaded guilty to sexually extorting teen boys and young men in Michigan, including one who took his own life, and a Virginia sheriff’s deputy who sexually extorted and kidnapped a 15-year-old girl.

Instagram said scammers often use direct messages to ask for “intimate images”.

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The professor trying to protect our private thoughts from technology | Neuroscience

The professor trying to protect our private thoughts from technology | Neuroscience

Pprivate thoughts may not be private for much longer, heralding a nightmarish world where political views, thoughts, stray obsessions and feelings can be interrogated and punished all thanks to advances in neurotechnology.

Or at least that is what one of the world’s leading legal ethicists of neuroscience believes.

In a new book, The Battle for Your Brain, Duke University bioscience professor Nita Farahany argues that such intrusions into the human mind by technology are so close that a public discussion is long overdue and lawmakers should immediately establish brain protections as it would for any other area of ​​personal liberty.

Advances in hacking and tracking thoughts, with Orwellian fears of mind control running just below the surface, is the subject of Farahany’s scholarship alongside urgent calls for legislative guarantees to thought privacy, including freedoms from “cognitive fingerprinting”, that lie within an area of ​​ethics broadly termed “cognitive liberty”.

Certainly

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