Yesterday, I watched a video by Vox ti­tled ‘The most ur­gent threat of deep­fakes is­n’t pol­i­tics.’ It got me think­ing about how much we post our so­cial life on­line and how eas­ily it can be mis­used.

From the video de­scrip­tion, em­pha­sis mine:

Deepfakes are of­ten por­trayed as a po­lit­i­cal threat — fake videos of politi­cians mak­ing com­ments they never made. But in a re­cent re­port, the re­search group Deeptrace found that 96% of deep­fakes found on­line are porno­graphic. Of those videos, vir­tu­ally all are of women. And vir­tu­ally all are made with­out their con­sent.

When I post my im­ages on­line, I open up GIMP, crop 1:1 the re­quired por­tion of the im­age, scale it down to 200x200 pix­els (or 250x250 pix­els if the up­load tar­get com­plaints), strip all meta­data, and save it at 50% to 100% qual­ity de­pend­ing on where I’m post­ing the im­age. It’s ex­tra work for sure, but I feel a lit­tle safer on­line. Perhaps there might be a sim­ple way to do this from the ter­mi­nal us­ing im­agemag­ick, but since I usu­ally crop as well, I pre­fer us­ing a GUI.

I won­der if it helps fight the al­go­rithms be­hind deep­fakes at all or if it’s just a false sense of se­cu­rity.