San Francisco orders Apple, Google to remove nudify apps from app stores

Official estimates Google and Apple likely made millions in nudify app fees.

The short version

• This week, San Francisco’s attorney general, David Chiu, sent cease-and-desist letters, demanding that Apple and Google remove 13 so-called nudification apps from their app stores, Wired reported.
• Nudification apps can make it trivially easy to transform ordinary photos of real people into explicit images.
• The harmful AI tools allow bad actors to remove clothing, change a person’s features, place them in sexualized positions, and swap victims’ faces onto other people’s naked bodies.

What happened

Chiu’s letter warned that app stores were violating “California’s laws that prohibit supporting services that create deepfake pornography,” Wired reported. Talking to Wired, Chiu said his office was “absolutely horrified” by how ubiquitous the nudifying technology has become, victimizing mostly women and children at an alarming scale as more tools became available.

Why it matters

“These images are used to bully, humiliate, and threaten women and girls,” Chiu told Wired.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.