Forget Project Ghostbusters and the Snapchat snaffle. It wasn’t so long ago that Facebook wanted to stare at my testicles.
They say that court reporting is a dead genre in the journalism trade but not when it comes to tech industrialists. I could just loiter around the civil courts in San Francisco and I’d pick up at least a dozen scandals per day, easy. This week’s biggest kerfuffle, however, was the unsealing of a court document alleging that in 2016, Facebook had initiated a security-crack operation to spy on what its users did on rival Snapchat.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Only a year later, Facebook was waggling its obsession with its users’ private data in our faces – hiding in plain sight, if you like. Aided and abetted by the Australian Government, the fake news disseminator became fascinated by our inseminators. By having a right old gander at my toilet duck, it said it hoped to stop other people from Googling my googlies.
In 2017, Australia's eSafety Office announced its participation with the Artist Latterly Known As Meta in a pilot image-matching programme. Its honourable intention was to hamper revenge porn, the craze that was already raging across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram at the time.
All very laudable, you say. Well, unless memory fails me, the programme required potential victims of revenge porn to pre-empt the situation by uploading shots of, er, ‘the celebrated military icon’ (i.e. Private Selfies) to Facebook for analysis before anyone else could. Then by the time their pea-brained former partners could get a chance to indulge in a bit of revenge porning, their photos would be recognised and blocked automatically.
That is to say, the eSafety Commissioner wanted to help me drop my strides while Zucker had a snicker at my pecker – a George Formby classic if ever there was one.
Of course the Ozzies wanted to do nothing of the sort. I am not an Australian citizen, for a start. I was just joshing for the sake of a few cheap sniggers. Besides, let's introduce a genuine sense of doubt: it is extremely unlikely that I'd ever become a victim of revenge porn, for a couple of important reasons.
First, I'm a bloke. This makes me 99.9% more likely to be an offender than a victim – and I have rounded that figure down.
Second, I have never knowingly taken photos of my wattle and nuggets. Unless, of course, you count that time on holiday when I was struggling to get my oversized smartphone out of an awkward inner pocket of my beach shorts and managed to Live Photo my naked backside.
As we tell youngsters, the only safe nude photos are the ones that aren't taken. Compromising photos or information should be destroyed, or not captured in the first instance. That's all very well but it was too late for my bongos, inadvertently digitised and already skybound.
Within seconds, and without my knowledge of its existence, the aforementioned sequential selection of frames in full HD (High Definition) and FMB (Full Motion Buttocks) was being backed up to the cloud automatically. Unknown to me, my hairy cheeks were already sitting on the Internet, waiting to be spread across social media.
I was blissfully unaware of my derrière’s two seconds of infamy until later. You can imagine my surprise when scrolling through my Facebook feed to see a startlingly animated preview of my mincing tushie alongside a cheerful suggestion that I share "the story" of my glutes with my friends.
It wasn’t just Facebook, either. X recommended that I optimise my butt for SEO by adding ALT text. Instagram thought my dookie maker was so brilliant that people might wish to "heart" it. Google Maps even proposed inserting a pin into my backside to assist the general public in finding it.
I can’t really blame Google Maps for its enthusiasm since it is the insecure app that I use the most, and at the time of the aforementioned butt-shot incident I had been furiously pinning landmarks that I felt were woefully absent from the system. My intention had been to build a private map of sites around London that would be of interest to amateur IT historians, and I was trying to sell the idea to The Register as a walking route of London for rubbernecking tech nerds.
OK, sane people would find such a thing intensely dull, but the map included such bangers as blue plaques (“so-and-so lived here”) for Thomas Young, Lord Kelvin, Mary Shelley, Jame Smithson, Charles Whetstone, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, Isaac Newton, HG Wells and the birthplace of Alan Turing.
Mme D and I also began haunting the capital’s great cemeteries as I photographed and pinned the graves of the likes of Charles Babbage, Douglas Adams, IK Brunel and Storm Thorgerson. I tracked down the London workshop sites of Babbage (since demolished) and John Logie Baird (still there, above the cafe on Frith Street), among others.
I never completed the task for multiple reasons. First, it became obvious the pins were scattered too widely for a single walking route so it would have to be split into three loops. Then I wanted to insert pub stops along each route and naturally that required me to test each pub, personally and thoroughly. Unfortunately this lengthy task was curtailed when the majority of the British public voted to tell Mme D to fuck off back where she came from.
Still, returning to my beach shorts incident… Just think, I was just one misplaced tap away from adding a pin to my own keister and turning it into a Google Maps landmark. People might have begun searching for walking directions to my caboose, reviewing the quality of my buns, confirming their opening hours, etc. Such is the speed of life, the next thing you know they'd be arranging bus tours and I'd have to install no-parking signs. On the plus side, I reckon the 3D satellite view would be awesome.
But let’s withdraw from my buttocks for a moment.
My interest in getting landmarks of no interest to anybody but myself onto Google Maps was reignited this week by a local newspaper story down here in the south of France. Apologies if the link won’t reveal the full story – you may need to be a subscriber – but somebody trawled up a brand new instance the almost-forgotten art of Being Caught Doing Strange Things On StreetView.
For those of you who can’t be arsed to look it up – or very sensibly do not wish to taint their browser cookie cache with such things – below is a screenshot of the scene, apparently recorded last September. For those who are happy to throw caution to the wind, here’s the StreetView link.
I am fascinated not so much by the larking about of a pair of bored labourers but that Google Maps has carefully blurred their identity but allowed the carefully posed act of slapstick violence – at least one hopes it was – intact for posterity.
But then, it’s only Google. It’s not like the French government was getting involved like the Australians in 2017, encouraging would-be murder victims to enact their own feared demise on StreetView just in case it happens that way in the future. It would have made a terrific episode of Columbo, mind.
However, if there are two types of organisation in whom I have no trust whatsoever with regard to keeping my personal data secure, they would be an international cloud operator and a government agency.
Confide my arse to the likes of Facebook and the public authorities? I may as well pop my crackshot onto an unencrypted USB stick, chuck it onto the back seat of a taxi and watch the Google analytics go crazy in the knowledge that I cut out the man in the middle and did so on my own terms.
Better still, that would absolutely 100% ensure that my hairy butt ends up in someone’s DALL-E or Midjourney results. Or should I be worried? The French police is already rolling out face recognition for the Paris Olympics – supposedly illegal but they don’t give a shit – so how do I know they aren’t already running what they might call fesse recognition? One visit to the naturist beach in Agde and the CCTV would identify me even with my back turned.
Then again, half of the mindless, pouting influencers I see on TikTok are people whose faces look like backsides. How will the software tell the difference? I just pray they haven’t yet perfected tagnut recognition or I’m done for.
Otherwise, props to those involved for at least trying to direct technology to attack itself. The more we do this, the greater the chance that AI-enhanced robots will spend so much time beating each other up, these tin machines will barely notice the human race watching from the sidelines, let alone eradicate it.
Until then, however, the task strikes me as too challenging for current tech. Auto-hashing of identity-specific butt-naked photos? Nah, not yet.
For now, our arses can't be cracked.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. What would he do, he asks, without a thesaurus of slang and euphemisms? His columns would be so repetitive, they’d thoroughly get on your Golden Globes.
Well, given the time of year, at least you are not on a beach posting images of chocolate starfish, Mr Dabbs.
Hmm. Wonder what the Google car would make of driving through villages in Somerset at the time when the annual scarecrow competition is on. All a bit Hot Fuzz!