Every weekend, social media awaits with a new challenge, so much so it's clearly a decade of the 'challenged', pun somewhat intended. Posting pics on social media - very often it's fun, but quite rarely it can backfire. The latest warning signal comes from Pune City Police, who posted a message against the ongoing Couple Challenge, asking couples to think twice before they uploaded a picture with their partner.
"A cute challenge can go wrong, if not cautious," said the Pune City Police in a written statement on social media. "Couple challenge is again trending on social media. Just an awareness, these pics may be misused for morphing, revenge porn, deepfake etc related cyber crimes."
Couple challenge, which by now everyone is either aware of or has participated in, is where the couples post pictures of themselves with their partner, around the world posing for the cameras. Given the sheer popularity, the challenge has invited millions of participants resulting in millions of couple pictures posted online but even sparked memes that, funnily, singles have been sharing.
Instagram alone has more than 36.5k posts under the hashtag couple challenge. The police officials further informed about having received a number of complaints from couples whose pictures were misused, morphed, and then uploaded on some adult websites.
I got my eyes on you: Hackers
How they do it is no mystery, whether they'll do with your pics might be. The possibilities with just one picture can be immense. The profitability of misusing any pic depends on its potential virality. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that pics posted on social media have been misused. Even more, unfortunately, this is certainly not the last time that they'll be misused.
Deep fake, revenge porn, morphing …
Gone are the days when the evidence of a morphed picture was screaming loud cut, copy, paste job. With the latest image processing techniques out there, one image getting transformed onto other image is such a seamless operation that it actually takes a technical expert's intervention to figure out the fake.
Deepfakes - Think of them as devices that can create an illusionary experience for the one observing, for instance, celebrity faces on porn videos and politicians saying something that never would in a language they would never understand.
Deepfakes too have often been popularly used by digital content creators dabbling in comedy. But the potential of deepfakes to ruin people's lives is so immense that they have actually been compared to "nuclear weapons" by Marco Rubio, a senator from America.
The first generation of deepfakes were in your face, but the latest one depends on two machine learning models. One of which replicates the data set to create forgeries, while the other model detects this data forgery. The process continues until no more forgeries can be detected by the second model. Deepfakes have been ranked as the top AI threat. As for revenge porn, it is just what it sounds like; while some resort to throwing acid, the more technically sound sick minds, resort to revenge porn, through one of the myriad techniques available digitally.
Unknowingly, your friends could put you at risk!
A detailed research study (conducted by researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia and the University of Vermont in the US, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour) once analyzed as to how much information about a person is encoded in their interactions with their close friends through social media. It found that science research teams didn't even need 15 accounts (as originally hypothesized) to figure a person's profile, likes, dislikes, travel history. It needed only 8 to 9 of such accounts.
The scary rise in cybercrime
Let alone the number of fake messages in circulation, by the month of June, the police informed that Maharashtra's Pune recorded a surge of 10 percent in cybercrime cases during the lockdown period. As per a Kaspersky Security Network report, India ranks 27th globally in the number of web threats in Q1 of 2020 as compared to 32nd in 2019.
