The celebrity nude ‘hack’ back in 2014 focused attention on the risks involved in having intimate photographs stored on your phone – and especially on cloud servers like iCloud. While our suspicions were correct that it wasn’t a hack at all, it did illustrate that poor security can put photos at risk.
A new app aims to automatically scan your iPhone for nudes, moving them to a protected vault in the app and then deleting them from both the camera roll and iCloud …
The Verge wryly notes that the two developers had the same response from most people when they first presented the app.
The impetus for its development came from Chiu speaking with Hollywood actresses as part of a movie project.
Of course, there’s little point in developing an app to keep nude photos out of the cloud if you need to use an online server to detect them, which is why Apple’s CoreML framework was key.
One challenge the team faced was that CoreML needs lots of examples of nude photos to analyze, which they provided by scraping porn sites.
Nude is a free download from the App Store, but requires a $0.99/month in-app purchase.
