Ashton Kutcher.
Interesting article though I would not expect a technology company to have all of the answers. The police are doing the actual work and need to be held accountable.
yes, but thorn is lobbying for changes to EU law that would require tech companies there to, among other things, purchase thorn’s product to scan user’s data
Oh for the love of god. When did we get to the point where EVERYTHING is a sinister plot hook.
Fucking lighten up.
Because it’s a self interested millionaire with a sketchy past, nothing he does is altruism, it’s all PR and self jerking.
Nothing ANYONE does is altruism anymore. Because no matter who they are, or what they do- someone will find something to bitch about or be offended by.
Do you prefer ignorance?
I prefer accepting that not everything that exists is there to scare me, offend me, or serve me in some way.
Some things just exist. And are what they say they are. I know… it’s insane to even so much as think it!
What is this man’s sketchy past?
All you need to do is Google “Ashton Kutcher sketchy past” and you’ll get lots of articles from long before this year, when shit finally hit the fan for him. He’s been a clear fake for a long time.
Oh you poor fool…
you are a mark
Care to elaborate?
The app is being used by police to persecute sex workers and marks, not to find children who are victims of child sex trafficking - because child sex traffickers are not stupid enough to give their “product” to anyone who would instantly put their faces on the internet for anyone to find.
Sex trafficking is a serious issue, but Kutcher nor his company has done their due diligence and are actually helping to persecute sex workers.
I’m not saying that it was intentional, but it does make the whole supposed effort seem like it’s more about optics and marketing.
And this illustrates that I’m a mark how exactly?
See, all I did was point out how everyone is so smugly up their own asses that they feel they can persecute anyone and anything to the point that no one should be bothered to try and do anything even remotely helpful- lest they be publicly shamed for not doing enough, or not doing it as the hive-mind thinks they should….
… and somehow, this makes me a mark?
Fucking hilarious.
Defending a famous, rich, rape apologist whose organization is doing more for hurting legal sex work than helping solve illegal sex trafficking is kind of mark behavior.
To me, when a person shows their true color, I automatically need to assume their past actions had ulterior motives.
deleted by creator
I just tried to explain what I thought the commenter was saying. He was being glib, and a little derisive. In any case, you play the same game and I can read your frustrations clearly. You justifiably tried to defend your position, but chose the wrong way of doing it.
I recommend taking a break a few days from comment section, even social media. Just get it out of your head for a while, try to find balance again. Social media can be very provocative and even infuriating at times. But it doesn’t help you to fight passive aggressive statements with aggressive statements.
In any case, I hope you take care of yourself and that you are well.
Ugh, it’s helping kids. Yuck, what an insincere article.
Iunno, if someone I knew was involved in trafficking-victim advocacy efforts, then turned around and penned a letter in defense of a rapist who caught 30 to life, I’d suddenly be second-guessing said advocate’s bonafides, and double-checking them too. That’s too rowdy a lapse of judgment for me personally to let slide; and all the parasocial weirdos suddenly jumping to Kutcher’s aid when it’s well known he was a 20 year old with a tongue down a 14 year old’s throat on primetime television is equally as sketchy.
"‘Just trust Ashton Kutcher’ is terrible public policy.”
I love how you completely disregard the people who actually work there and the people who actually run Thorn.
I don’t address techbro wastemen; and I haven’t been given any reason to believe any of them are worth addressing if they’re still schlepping facial recognition routines that still routinely misidentify Black and brown faces. I love how you completely disregard the weirdos in the room to peddle your wagon-circling crap.
Don’t whatabout me. If you’re going to criticize a company because you don’t like the founder, then at least own up to your faulty generalization.
Take this amateur debatebro shit back to reddit, fuckboy. You’re the one who wanted to get huffy with me tryna up some hollywood weirdo who probably has just as many skeletons as Masterson in his closet; I don’t owe you shit
Prediction: It’ll be helping police arrest consensual sex workers at a higher rate than it helps abused children. In jurisdictions where police are paid off by organized crime, it will help organized pimps (who actually do sex trafficking) thwart competition from the consensual market.
Cops are the ones raping kids, judging by recent headlines
I’m sure it will. The problem is that instead focusing on that issue, the article is mostly melodramatic bandwagon bullshit.
The article contains less journalism than it does pearl-clutching and veiled tsks about actors.
Again, insincere.
If the article is about the threat of illegitimate police use of a legitimate and useful law enforcement tool saving children, make the article about that, rather than title it with a facetious question tied to the latest media punching bag irrelevant to any meat in the story.
they’re selling a tech product that they hope to make mandatory by law, it’s not some charity lol
laWl totally.
You think giving surveillance tools to cops helps kids? You think they don’t abuse it? You didn’t read the article so clearly not, but these tools are being used by cops to presecute sex workers and innocent people.
Rather than talk about the abuse of power, this article titles itself and spends much of its content hemming and hawing over Ashton Kutcher and the oh dear but what if the actor man you thought was good was not as good as you wanted him to be?
Puffy predatory crap.
And saving kids is great! The problem is basically the epitome of the phrase, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
On the surface, a false positive identification isn’t that bad. Validate the data and move on. Case closed, right? Not exactly.
It probably takes time to filter through false positive alerts and maybe some additional investigations are started. The biggest problem is that society naturally follows “guilty until proven innocent”. If someone is caught up in a trafficking case, and they are actually innocent, their career and association with their existing social circles are basically done. That is regardless if they are innocent and that is horrible.
Also there is persistence of data. Once a person gets associated in these datasets, is probably near impossible to have that data removed. This could look really bad if it is found as part of an unrelated investigation and exposed. I won’t even go into the invasion of privacy issues.
While it is great to catch actual bad people, possibly destroying the life of another is also bad. I really wish I could say that is a person is actually innocent they have nothing to worry about. That simply doesn’t apply here.
Again, if what are you are writing about was the content of the article and how the article was presented, it would it be a good article.
Instead, it’s some coy vulture shaking their head and demanding everyone stare at the pop culture dunce of the day who has removed himself from spotlight because he knew the vultures were descending.
You’ve written more relevant content in your post and presented said content more genuinely than this article has done with thousands of words.
Yeah, we live in a time there people want to be shocked/offended/angered by everything. And if it doesn’t fall into of these reactions- it’s not worth talking about.
Is the article about how spotlight doesn’t save children? No. Because it does.
Is it about the apparently genuine campaign to make some impact on a horrific reality? No.
Is Kutcher implicated in anything other than a good-faith effort to aid in identifying and fighting against sex trafficking? No.
He resigned immediately after making a culturally insensitive sentence to avoid vultures, and a vulture is swooping after him to capitalize on his poor judgment.
He resigned immediately after making a culturally insensitive sentence to avoid vultures, and a vulture is swooping after him to capitalize on his poor judgment.
Okay, let’s not pretend it was a single misinterpreted sentence, and now poor Ashton is unfairly hounded.
Please, refocus on what’s important to all of you: the immaterial details of celebrity gossip.
Yep, and the Patriot act made us all safer. /s
This bandwagon you’re scrabbling to catch hold of is actually for media gossip, not so much about corruption of authority, but your hyperbolic and irrelevant comment will be tacked on late though it is, to everybody else’s.
Fascist states. That’s who benefits by circumventing encryption, which is what Thorn lobbies for. The corps win, the authoritarians in government win, and the people lose. I just hope it’s due to naivety and not done intentionally because I already have too little faith in the world.
In 2017, Kutcher told Congress that 2,000 child-trafficking victims were identified in six months, thanks to Spotlight. Thorn’s impact report that year noted that 103 children were “rescued.” According to the FBI’s own numbers, they found 175 minor victims between 2009 and 2015
“Thorn builds products for police, not trafficking survivors,” says Sabra Boyd, a Seattle-based writer and consultant.
Spotlight is a blunt instrument that can’t do anything beyond identifying a survivor. Brian, the Seattle cop, acknowledged that taking a victim away from their trafficker and keeping them safe over the long term are two different things.
How many trafficked children identified by Spotlight, Bruggeman wonders, are harmed by police intervention, physically or psychologically?
“I just got a sense they really believe that their work is having some positive impact,” says Bruggeman, “and didn’t really seem interested in looking too deeply into any negative impact.”
Over the past two decades, the fight against child sex trafficking has become an obsession of the religious right and conspiracy theorists.
The crime becomes synonymous with big-screen narratives, like Taken or Sound of Freedom, which don’t reflect the reality that most victims are exploited by people they know.
“There’s really no sunlight on exactly how Spotlight operates, how its algorithms operate, and how people end up in their database,” says Trujillo.
Quite a damning article and it doesn’t even touch on the anti-encryption aspect.
