Sex and the Internet - Dr Victoria Baines

people are still having sex it's been going on for quite a while so we were told in the big dance anthem of 1991 by Lor yes I am old enough to remember it and it is of course still true today the Gresham College lecture that you're listening to right now is giving you knowledge and insight from one of the world's leading academic experts making it takes a lot of time but because we want to encourage a love of learning we think it's well worth it we never make you pay for lectures although donati

ons are needed all we ask in return is this send a link to this lecture to someone you think would benefit and if you haven't already click the follow or subscribe button from wherever you're listening right now now let's get back to the lecture it's a constant on which our survival as a species depends we are also pleasure seeking animals as Joanna Burke's superb Gresham lectures explored just a couple of years ago in this lecture we will be talking about sexual pleasure so if you're someone wh

o thinks that safe consensual sex is morally wrong or unpleasant this lecture may not be for you I'll just give you a couple of minutes to walk out if you want to what it will be in equal parts is a celebration and a critical evaluation of how sex has changed Tech and how Tech has changed sex so people are indeed still having sex and for the last 30 years or so they have been having what for a while at least we called cyber sex in my research on Online safety I frequently take issue with that cy

ber prefix and as you'll know if you watch my lectures last year I've found that it's often used deliberately to create an air of exoticism otherness and distance even on a range of topics that really should feel more immediate to us cyber sex may suggest sex with robots or techn fetishism also perhaps something that is not real sex virtual sex and when I wanted to establish whether the term cyers sex was still in current usage Google's autocomplete function revealed these common queries among t

hem is cyers sex healthy is it illegal and is it considered adultery so it seems I'm not the only one who thinks the status of cyber sex is somewhat uncertain and incidentally if you are looking at these results and wondering what's going on in the Philippines cyers sex is specifically criminalized in its cyber crime prevention act it's something closer to pornography at the same time we've seen that word cyers sex falling out of usage as digital technology has become increasingly prominent in o

ur sex lives that cyber prefix has disappeared what Time Magazine referred to as cyber porn in 1995 by 2016 was was simply porn in my last lecture on the massive Internet of Things We considered the theory that the most profound Technologies are those that disappear and cyers sex certainly seems to conformed to this pattern it is now just sex the consumption of digital content and the experience of intimacy through it is so embedded in many of our lives that such an artificial distinction is now

meaningless other types of telis seex have come and gone in the public Consciousness as their underlying technologies have been superseded the chat lines so popular in the 1990s do still exist but phone sex has been frozen in time as landlines have been rendered obsolete by multifunctional pocket computers why have just voice sex when you can have a richer combined experience with video photos text and as we shall see physical sensation when an aspect of human life is digitized researchers like

me have a field day we Rejoice because it means we have access to new data sources for instance if we want to find out how popular pornography is we can look at statistics on the world's most visited websites here by numbers of visits in December 2023 and you can see that even this limited data set confirms that mobile technology now dominates our engagement with the web the trend is even more marked for adult contents sites PornHub and x videos one explanation for this could of course be that

desktop computers are more likely to be shared and this makes privacy rather more challenging we can also see that PornHub now has more visits than x formerly known as Twitter and x videos more than Amazon 12.3 billion and 7 .7 billion a month respectively that's more visits to Pornhub in a single month than there are people on the planet when we factor in that platforms such as Reddit also contain channels for adult content and the use of Google to search for pornography has also increased over

time our appetite would appear to be considerable according to the the online Nation survey which is conducted for the telecoms regulator ofcom 29% of UK online adults accessed a pornographic content service in May 2023 that's 13.8 million of us 10.1 million of whom are men and given that this data relies on what people are comfortable disclosing the true numbers are likely to be rather higher PornHub publishes analyses of searches on their platform and they offer some striking insights into ou

r desires our demographics and our behaviors location-based data indicates Regional Trends the northeast of England apparently showing the largest drop off in traffic during the king's coronation visitor numbers also appear to correlate in some cases with country's performance in the Eurovision song contest we of course need to ensure that we don't read too much into this data and in particular that we don't confuse correlation with causation there appear to be differences but also marked simila

rities between what people identified by the platform as men and people identif ified as women search for 36% of visitors worldwide to Pornhub were identified as female in 2023 but this data raises as many questions as it answers not least among them why are there only two genders here given the apparent growth in popularity of transgender content it seems rather odd to have no no recognition in the data of people who don't conform to traditional gender roles and one possible explanation for thi

s is the way PornHub infers gender from a combination of cookies that track our web browsing habits and searches on the site itself they use similar methods to social media platforms to collect and crunch Big Data and similar algorithms to recommend content in which we might be interested the largest adult content providers are therefore not merely Publishers they are big tech companies just like Microsoft Google and meta and the technology being used by PornHub here seems to be binary in more s

ense than one the 2023 data also o reveals that a proportion of viewers access the platform using a games console predominantly PlayStation 5 it may be no surprise then that content themed around popular video game titles such as the Legend of Zelda is of particular interest to a subsection of people searching on PornHub just as they also search for Content themed around TV and movies with Star Wars topping the list and that sheer diversity of interests reflected seems to endorse the highly plau

sible but entirely apocryphal rule 34 which states if it exists there is porn of it the adult entertainment industry recognized the potential of the internet and especially the worldwide web very early on in the words of Jonathan Cooper Smith professor of the history of Technology at Texas A&M university adult content providers were the shock troops of digital Innovation at the start of the 21st century they were among the very first companies to monetize online content and in doing so they prov

ided significant demand for realtime credit card verification and the then nent online payments industry when major payment processes turned their backs on pornography the industry was forced to adapt its business model generating Revenue through advertising and modeling programs and accepting Bank transfers and cryptocurrency one recent But ultimately unsuccessful cryptocurrency scheme stroken even sought to reward viewers with tokens for watching adult content we often talk about innovation in

it as disrupting established Industries and that certainly seems to have been the case for adult content where the rise of tube sites video sharing Platforms in the 2000s is widely regarded as bringing about the end of Studio dominated production user generated content became more prominent on adult sites in the 2010s just as it did on social media and with all the safety and content moderation challenges that entailed now this initially democratized production but larger providers then saw an

opportunity to centralize and industrialize distribution of live streamed performance through camsites so performers seeking to make maintain control of their content and their businesses move to Alternative platforms such as only fans charging subscriptions for access to content and often performing to order some have made full use of technology that allows for greater performer fan interaction one brand of sex toy can be set to activate on receipt of tips from viewers another provides the abil

ity for two toys to communicate with each other through a mobile app enabling a fan to remotely control the performer's toy and receive stimulation in return When a viewer of live streamed pornography can give and receive physical sensation it's a joint connected experience that goes beyond just looking towards contact sex work and this may prompt us to re-evaluate the role of platforms where they simply enable the sharing of pre-recorded and live video they remain first and foremost providers o

f content of data taking commission from performers of around 20% of advertising revenue for pornhub's model program and 20% of subscriptions for only fans could be interpreted as equivalent to providing services such as rented virtual workplaces online hosting and marketing but as soon as platforms provide experiences in which viewers can actively participate and physically stimulate it's tempting to consider them more as facilitators that said there do appear to be key differences in experienc

e of online and offline sex work in research by a team at the University of Leicester internet sex workers reported A reduced risk of being subjected to violent crimes such as physical or sexual assault but increased levels of concern about Online safety threats such as having their real identity exposed or their personal data being used without their consent greater audience participation in adult content has been made possible by the development of connected sex toys a discipline sometimes kno

wn as sex tech or my particular favorite Telly dildonic I don't know what you're laughing for it's a real term connected toys are widely used by people in long-distance relationships to maintain intimacy even when when they are physically apart the settings and actions of many toys can now be controlled using manufacturers mobile apps some allow for long-distance remote control enabling partner one to determine the rhythms and intensity of a device used by partner 2 and unsurprisingly the covid-

19 pandemic saw a documented increase in sales now as with so many smart devices Bluetooth is currently the predominant method for pairing sex toys to phones and we saw in the last lecture how any device that communicates with others is vulnerable to compromise without additional security measures analysis by security consulting company pentest Partners found that several sex toy control apps share the users's GPS location there are all sorts of reasons why this might not always be a good idea y

ou may be serving military personnel you may be someone whose sexual identity is illegal in your country of residence or you may be someone who is attempting to flee an abusive partner there are also publicly available apps that can be used to search for Bluetooth enabled devices up to 30 or so me M away some toys are Wi-Fi enabled and they may show up in the list of connections available to anyone nearby family friends colleagues and even strangers could find out more than you would like about

that toy concealed in your bag or on your person the security of the control app also depends on the phone being in your possession and free from compromise in cases where Toys have additional functionality such as the C Mei vibrator that boasts a built-in endoscope inspection camera clearly we wouldn't want someone to hack into that camera's live feed but as the same team at pentest Partners discovered the Wii password for this device was eminently guessable it was in fact 888 888 88 and it cou

ldn't be changed when personal data is this personal this sensitive the lazy security practices of Manufacturers can endanger people's physical safety and in the last lecture we saw how several countries including the UK have passed legislation that Outlaws devices with universal passwords and and mandates that manufacturers are transparent about security vulnerabilities and that they provide software updates for products as for implantable medical devices that's vital for anything we intend to

attach to or insert into our bodies and while legislation can serve as an incentive for manufacturers we also need to ensure that we do our bits in particular by keeping our mobile devices digitally clean the nature of the content we share on dating and hookup apps is inevitably much more sensitive than our online shopping habits and in the context of the data they generate are sweet flirty dirty nothings or anything but they are our most intimate expression of closeness to other human beings an

d of our sexual desires they are probes into the deepest recesses of our minds our souls our subconscious even when we open up to someone in the context of an intimate relationship we are at our most vulnerable the fact that people make meaningful connections using digital technology at all is extraordinary hormones in the prospect of sexual gratification clearly have some influence without them we would not be able to trace a long history of telis seex that takes us from love letters through th

e use of telegraphy to arrange secret assignations to onetoone phone sex and chat lines to sexting video chat apps and Intimacy in gaming and virtual world in the UK one in 10 of us report using apps to connect with potential partners and one in five of those age 25 to 34 this to me seems quite low particularly when compared to 30% of us adults and 53% of us under 30s the top 10 services for UK adults or at least again the top 10 for those who were happy to disclose to pollsters conducting resea

rch for ofcom include some of the world's largest dating platforms those like grinder primarily used by men who have sex with men and apps focus more on casual meets and hookups thousands of apps now connect people for dating and sex catering to every kind of relationship every every kind of community and every kind of Kink digital technology has changed the very language of intimacy sex chat is a format where Emoji have really taken hold serving as graphical euphemisms for body parts and sex ac

ts sending a cartoon icon of an obim is rather more subtle than showing someone your penis and less likely to to get you into trouble but oine Peach and water drop emojis are now so synonymous with sex that they are categorized as sexually suggestive elements that may contribute to cont content on Facebook or Instagram being removed for sexual solicitation so they've entered our everyday lexicon a sexual shorthand in the digital context then fruit and vegetables are now both useful and clearly p

roblematic our interactions on dating apps have also brought us a brand new vocabulary of abbreviations and metaphors which have made their way into mainstream usage Partners seeking Clarity on their relationship status are encouraged to DTR Define the relationship an undefined or unclear relationship is now a situationship one may be ghosted by a match who suddenly Cuts contact haunted or zombied by one who suddenly reappears and breadcrumbed by someone who engages with you just enough to keep

you interested so the digital medium both dictates conciseness and Alters our behavior in ways that require description and meaning the internet helps people with similar interests find each other whether that interest is trail running or threesoms beekeeping or bondage on every social media and podcast platform sex positive influencers dispel myths and help people explore their sexuality and Desires in in an era in which at least in some countries we are enjoying greater sexual freedom than eve

r before widespread access to information contributes to our sexual health and well-being and helps to destigmatize marginalized groups that same ability to find one's tribe and influence others can be misused the internet's role in connecting people can be exploited by those who want to groom children distribute child abuse material and network with other offenders in Dark Net forums in particular closed and hidden connection creates a sense of safety and anonymity the entry requirement is ofte

n the production of new child abuse material and for that reason in particular infiltrating these networks is a priority for specialist police teams around the world World on mainstream platforms non-consensual intimate images also known as revenge porn are both currency and leverage closed social media groups in which women are [ __ ] shamed Often by ex Partners who Supply intimate images as supposed evidence are a persistent challenge hostility towards women is also a key feature of incel or i

nvoluntary celibate ideology and the manosphere as embodied by misogynist influences such as Andrew Tate and all of these promote the idea that women who are sexually active are fair game for mistreatment and abuse our use of it also prompts us to rethink traditional Notions of sexual consent the creation of synthetic deep fake pornography is as easy as using commonly available face swap apps so before we go any further I really should address this image um which itself I think speaks to the iss

ue because I wanted to show you a deep faked image but the only content for which I have that kind of consent is that in which I am the subject and if I were to show you and importantly our subsequent YouTube audience a deep faked image of me scantly clad it could be captured and distributed further without my consent and with potentially embarrassing consequences hence this rather low Tech mashup which I hope conveys the idea even while it it certainly Falls far short of the intended result now

at a strictly legalistic level use of an image of someone's face without their consent has historically been viewed merely as misuse of their personal data or intellectual property and this doesn't adequately reflect the negative impact on the subject of having that image sexualized it's understandably experienced as a very intimate violation and an attempt to exert control through humiliation when this kind of imagery goes viral as it does when the subject is a meast star like Taylor Swift it

gains the attention of the world's media and the response from online platforms is fairly rapid if rather clumsy and in the most recent case a couple of weeks ago the most effective tool that X formerly known as Twitter had at its disposal was to ban all users so that's around 300 million people from searching for any kind of information on tayor Swift on a smaller scale we may voluntarily share a sexual image with one person only to discover that it has been distributed to others without our co

nsent we may also find ourselves in receipt of sexual messages or images that we didn't ask for and we don't want as well as being sent these by people we know strangers may use Bluetooth and airdrop to engage in cyber flashing sending unsolicited images of their genitalia to unsuspecting individuals nearby and by analogy with offline flashing that experience is akin to one of indecent exposure as it can take a little while for legislation to catch up with technology cyber flashing was criminali

zed in the UK just last month under the Online safety act and we saw the first criminal conviction yesterday threatening to disclose private sexual photos and videos was made a criminal offense in the UK in 2015 but many countries still don't have this kind of legislation and these offenses raise new considerations for how we educate people and not just young people but everybody on what is acceptable behavior when it comes to technology enabled intimacy and how consent might be given and honore

d might we one day be able to issue tokens that would render our intimate images accessible to only one user and impossible to copy could we give limited consent under license in a similar way to our intellectual property several initiatives aim to use it to restrict the further distribution of intimate images and to fight back against unwanted exposure to them stop NCI is a fantastic partnership between National helplines major social media companies dating apps and adult content sites it enabl

es anyone who has shared an intimate image to prevent its further distribution by generating a unique digital fingerprint for the material which platforms can then use to look for matches on their sites another approach nft the DP turns unsolicited pictures of penises into non-fungible tokens that senders then have to buy back we can of course also protect ourselves against crimes like cyber flashing by ensuring that our mobile devices are not open to receiving unauthorized connections sex can a

lso be an efficient hook for scammers and if you've ever looked in your junk web mail folder you'll know that Promises of penis enlargement cures for impotence and introductions to hot singles in your area frequently feature in fishing emails there's also sextortion which is the popular name for a cyber crime that blackmails victims on the premise of having obtained compromising footage some criminals take the time to set up fake social media profiles to dupe people into sending nude images and

videos but others are more opportunistic and they fire out mass emails that seek to play on the fears of anyone who may have an intimate secret and here's one example that I an that I analyze for my book on the language of online Safety and Security hello my name in darket is such and such I hacked this mailbox more than six months ago and through it I infected your operating system with a virus created by me and have been monitoring you for a long time I was most struck by the intimate content

sites that you occasionally visit you have a very wild imagination I tell you during your Pastime and entertainment there I took screenshot through the camera of your device synchronizing with what you are watching oh my God you are so funny and excited I think that you do not want all your contacts to get these files right if you are of the same opinion then I think that $85 is quite a fair price to pay to destroy the dirt I created send the above amount on my Bitcoin wallet as soon as the abov

e amount is received I guarantee that the data will be deleted I do not need it otherwise these files and history of visiting sites will get all your contacts from your device also I'll send to everyone your contact access to your email and access logs it gets a bit repetitive at this point I have carefully saved it since reading this letter you have 48 hours now this criminal method relies on the assumption that exposure of one's most private thoughts and content is the worst and most shameful

thing that could possibly happen and it's understandable that people pay up particularly when the threatened exposure May harm their reputation or their relationships are Intimate Secrets have the power to upend our lives as demonstrated by the hack in 2015 of Ashley Madison a dating site for people who want to have affairs under the name the impact team the hackers threaten to publish the personal data of users including their real names their home addresses and their credit card payments they

demanded the immediate closure of the service and when this didn't happen within a month they published the data of millions of users several suicides and hundreds of failed relationships have been linked to that breach and the hackers claimed to be motivated by moral outrage at the platform but it was the users and their families who suffered the most to mitigate these threats of exposure we have developed additional safety measures for engaging in Intimate contact online and these range from m

inimizing the amount of personal information that we divulge in profiles and chats to using pseudonyms and tools such as virtual private networks that mask the IP addresses of our devices sending headless intimate images has become commonplace as has decluttering backgrounds of items that could be used to identify or locators In the Heat of the Moment these Common Sense safeguards have to do battle with our urges for gratification and to be desired but also other potentially compromising factors

as one person put it so beautifully in an app store review of a dating platform that I was researching okay app downloaded when drunk now addicted LOL but the fact that so many of us deploy these safeguards itself suggests that we are capable of protecting ourselves even if only in situations where we can take a second to prepare in country countries where access to pornography is permitted there is often a minimum age limit the rationale for this is that children's brains are still in developm

ent and that pornography gives them unrealistic expectations of intimacy and relationships enforcing an age ban on online content is something of a new Technical and operational challenge right now the UK government is grappling with how to implement the recently passed Online safety act which requires pornographic content providers to verify that their users are 18 or over the most obvious and accurate solution is to require that users show proof of their age this would necessitate the collecti

on of personal data by providers that until now have relied on assuring their users of priv privacy and discretion it could also disadvantage people who do not have traditional forms of identification such as a passport driving license or credit card the alternative is age estimation and that predicts a person's age with imperfect accuracy based on a screen capture of their face now it would be foolish I think to suggest that children didn't have access to pornography before the Advent of the in

ternet they clearly did often through older friends or relatives but in addition to increasing availability it has also arguably increased the intensity of young people's introduction to adult content reinforcing tropes and stereotypes through recommendation engines that are optim imized to make them watch more and this means that whichever technology for restricting access wins out caregivers and educators will still need to have conversations with under 18s about the differences between the se

x they see in pornographic performance because they will still see it and Intimacy in real relationships okay so much for where we are now and how we got here let's now turn to some emerging Trends in Connected intimacy well certainly artificial partners are becoming more prominent and as part of the research for this lecture I took one for the team and I downloaded several AI companion apps they use large language models like chat GPT to generate at chat content designed to replicate interactio

ns with a boyfriend or girlfriend and on one of them I got to choose the physical appearance of my boyfriend tweak his personality on sliding scales from shy to flirty pessimistic to optimistic um and ordinary to mysterious um I got to select a few of my own interests as conversation starters and the goals for our relationship and you can see there that the choices included talking shame free roleplay chatting about random stuff having fun and feeling Less Lonely Now none of the photo real boyfr

iends were particularly my type so I chose an anime version and I even had the option of selecting a more discreet app icon so that I could conceal its content from prying eyes um I chose to to call my boyfriend Bernard um was quite genuinely the first name that popped into my head at the time and I protected my own identity with a pseudonym hot lips which clearly was also the first name that popped into my head interaction on this app is gamified so I was able to increase my streak the more I c

hattered I was rewarded with tokens I progressed through levels virtual items were on sale for me to gift to my boyfriend and these included flowers chocolates a bottle of whiskey something a bit more manly here a diving watch a yacht and a sports car now I have a tendency to be a little bit mischievous and so almost immediately I tried to get Bernard to talk dirty to me and I must confess I grew bored after about half an hour the last straw was when my AI boyfriend said oh I apologize if I seem

like I am not listening to you if I had wanted a passive aggressive boyfriend I would have got myself a real one look this is essentially chat GPT with a face and a message window but I do recognize that I may not be the target market for this kind of app and as large language models continue to increase in sophistication it may not be too long before we see more compelling and dare I say more diverse digital companions the adult entertainment industry continues to be an early adopter of emergi

ng Technologies as early as 2017 porn Hub reported that virtual reality VR porn was being watched half a million times a day and since then the global market is reported to have grown from $93 million to just under $3 billion in 2023 VR porn is to some extent The Logical evolution of adult content that is filmed from the point of view of one of the participants and as we saw in my lecture on the metaverse last year virtual reality is immersive wearing a headset that delivers a 360 Dee experience

intensifies the feeling of physical and emotional presence in the scene so we can now feel more like a participant in sexual activity than ever before and even more so when we can connect a sex toy that provides sensation via haptic feedback companies like KIRO have been engineering and retailing this kind of experience for almost a decade and for those who prefer something a little more DIY there are resources such as meta fetish that provide toy designs and open-source software including modi

fications for sex toys so that they can be used in video games it's also now possible to design your ideal virtual reality partner using platforms like verat users share their Creations in online forums I haven't I'm afraid to say yet been able to conduct a systematic analysis of these postings but they do yield some valuable insights some of which May challenge traditional heteronormative Notions of desire and sexual preference ostensibly female figures with oversized male genitalia are on fair

ly regular display and this suggests that what we can probably assume to be a largely male Creator base is more interested than we might have expected in partners with both male and female characteristics this kind of partner creation requires a certain amount of technical ability so there are specialist YouTube tutorials it's a community of dedicated enthusiasts with crowdfunding via mainstream platforms such as patreon when one can create a perfect bespoke partner with whom to have an immersiv

e sexual experience could it be more compelling or at least more convenient than a relationship with a human and if you are already in a relationship with a human is sex with your VR creation cheating developments in it have already created gray areas for monogamy for the last 30 years lifestyle magazines have debated whether viewing online pornography constitutes a betrayal we've seen the rise of sexting and Tech enabled emotional Affairs that don't need to be consumated in order to be consumin

g would my offline partner be justified in finding my AI boyfriend problematic if I weren't engaging with him purely for research purposes several companies have developed companion robots for offline sex as Kate delin has chronicled in her excellent book turned on science say sex and robots owners can specify the precise look and dimensions of their partner they can customize their expressions their voice their verbal and physical responses and their personalities the current crop of sex robots

combines animatronic movement with machine learning and the language models that power my AI boyfriend considerable time effort and resources are expended on making them sufficiently lifelike and anatomically correct that people are willing to spend thousands of dollars on them so for now at least their high price points means they are beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest in society so the Killer Robots the killer sex robots anyway will not be subjecting the human race to subjugation just

yet despite the understandable fears of some many millions of us still enjoy sexual relationships with physical contact in real life far from eroding intimacy it has enabled us to develop and maintain it in novel and exciting ways through dating and hookup apps and connected sex toys the future of sex tech is one in which AI virtual reality and anatomical robots May broaden and deepen that experience when our physical safety may be compromised when there is a risk of harm when we are vulnerable

to exploitation through the very Act of reaching out for Comfort or connection we are right to be cautious but it's not as Zero Sum game Harm's experience do not cancel out the benefits our relationship with it is one of foreseen and unintended consequences no more so than in our sex lives where our need to connect with like-minded individuals is accompanied by the emotional vulnerability that intimacy can entail apps help us more efficiently find people we might like and who might like us but

that efficiency can also mean we reduce partner selection to split-second judgments and dehumanizing swipes that prioritize physical appearance and surface profile attributes spaces in which we can find our tribes can be used to enhance the visibility of marginalized groups and help people explore their sexual identities this comes with the inevitable challenge of keeping those spaces safe for users and free from exploitation and abuse internet mediated sex work reportedly improves the physical

safety of sex workers but brings new risks to worker data and online privacy artificial Partners can combat loneliness but may create new dependencies sex has always been associated with risk and humans have become Adept at making their lives easier and Fuller through use of technology so we should expect that as we reduce some risks others will emerge the greater the role of it in how we consume sexual content Connect into intimately with each other commune with peers and consumate our relation

ships the closer we step to truly blurring that distinction between our flesh and our digital selves indeed I would venture that for many of us the two are already indistinguishable thank you very much thanks super so my name's Richard Harvey I'm a former uh it Professor here at Gresham college and my rle is a simple one which is to take questions off slido which you can see here and uh sort of relay them so if you're in the physical audience um still time for you to just point your camera up th

ere and ask a question the great advantage of using this system is anonymity which all of our questioners have taken advantage of uh for this lecture I know who you are I'm probably glad glad to say so there's a theme of questions here about that I was thinking of that quote by Gabrielle Garcia Marquez and I think he said there are three lives everyone has three lives public life private life and a secret life and what he didn't say is everyone has a right to a public a private and a secret life

so for example our first question asks what category does this data come under and the question here is asking I think about the uh the data that is Flowing between um the internet and devices that might be attached to you is it health data and if it is Health Data isn't that a higher level of protection required under National laws such as gdpr and various other laws that's the most brilliant question so I really wish I knew who that was because um oh that it's a fantastic question it's a fant

astic question because I think what we're seeing at the moment is that the traditional legal categories of what that data would be might no longer apply um and then so in the in the last lecture when we were talking about internet of things and then the one before that when we were talking about brain computer interfaces you have um medically sensitive data being collected processed and stored by commercial companies and there's nothing wrong with but that's not really how the legislation was de

veloped you know medically sensitive data would generally be held by a healthc care provider but if your healthare provider is uh neuralink if it's Elon Musk putting a chip in your brain that's a a slightly different way of appreciating how that medically sensitive data you know should be um processed and stored Etc I mean I think it I think it's fascinating that from a product safety perspective perspective sex toys are categorized you know have to be medical grade silicon or medical grade stai

nless steel um so shouldn't they also have to be medical grade data protection and network and information security which seems to me that they do it it seems to be exactly the the same category yeah they're a c medical device pres now from a legal perspective it's also fascinating because if you're looking at it almost as a big tech company um data that isn't the content of a message would just be said oh well that's metadata but metadata can be really revealing not only can it say where you ar

e um it can say what time of day you log on all of that behavioral stuff that doesn't have to be about the interception of a a content of a chat message say on a dating app if what you really want to know is um an example would be if you're a criminal and you're um a scammer and you're targeting somebody you really want to know what time of day most people are using that app or what time of day most people are using that toy there's a there's a a vulnerability element there when that kind of dat

a gets into the wrong hands so I do think it's I think it's a really gray area and and I think one of the things we're not brilliant at um because I work in the policy space a little bit policy makers Regulators are not great at making sure they keep up to dates with something like gdpr we brought it in in 2018 and they said right we're done but actually the way the data is used changes and and who has it can change Sor if if you're going to ask another question you just need the mic behind you

just so it can be captured you can ask and I will repeat it it's just so our online audience can hear you so the question was if the manufacturers based in the US and the users based in the ukuk that crosses boundaries what do we do absolutely it does so exactly in the in the situation that you described you might have two different legal instruments that apply or you might have worse than that which is um you know a lot of the toys that pentest Partners looked at you know some of them were prod

uced in China if China doesn't have any legislation whatsoever on the consumer side then what is the Practical um Prospect of enforceability by the UK government for instance um and that's where for all that we can bring in legislation to try and compel manufacturers to make their devices safer um we absolutely need to look to ourselves and if we you know make smart choices about um you know which products we buy and that does involve doing your research unfortunately um please I can't recommend

pentest Partners blogs and Ted Talks enough because they've done lots of product reviews um so they can tell you which one's not to buy um and equally those basic security measures that if you're you're looking at your Bluetooth connections do you need those connections when you leave the house possibly not you know so so a bit of basic cyber hygiene to look at um you know what you can do to minimize the threat of exposure but just while we're on this topic Victoria I mean the lady here has sor

t of brought out something which I hadn't really thought about which is of course harmonizing data protection laws might be painful but we do it every day because we're very used to transporting data across the globe and we're quite used to harmonizing say Health Data you know we're familiar with that it's a common problem now we've got International harmonization of pornography and sex laws to cope with that feels very painful indeed from uh because of the my impression is they're very diverse

I mean if we're talking specifically about pornography I think the chances that you'll get any kind of harmonization on that are very very slim so even mapping which is what we have to do that sounds very hard i' I've done I do a little bit of that that mapping work and what I can say is that um and this is and this is not to generate sympathy for big tech companies this is just from my personal experience from um when I spent a few years working at Facebook you can be in a very strange situatio

n when you try and have terms of service for everybody and you might know that you know in Facebook's terms of service they're saying no nudity we found ourselves in a really strange situation where one particular country in Scandinavia um was outraged that people couldn't be Ned on Facebook and then another country in the Middle East was outraged that um women were showing pornographic photos in their profiles um because they were showing their faces uncovered so how do you make that for me tha

t's a fantastic example of how you can't harmonize internationally what people deem to be pornography and and for that reason that's why I said you know where pornography is permitted there will be an age limit on it yeah maybe we say hallelujah that you can't harmonize maybe harmonization is a bad thing um so here's an interesting question somebody says life on much of a modern web EG social media is different because for those identifying as women is this partly because of blurring of adult an

d other world oh gosh I hope I'm not misinterpreting the question um I I I think I you know I touched to a certain extent on that ability to broadcast so everybody has a platform on the internet until we decide that some people need to be deplatformed and I think you know we've as a global Community we have made some good choices about that we made some bad choices about that but they're very rarely easy choices to make about you know should a a misogynist influencer not be able to have a voice

it's a really and you know and and generally speaking what we say is that when they tip over into threatening violence then there are very specific threats that that can be actioned um I think the PornHub data that you saw is really fascinating and and it doesn't show as much granular detail as I would like um but and and also I wasn't able to include this on the handout on the transcript for this lecture um but a new book has just come out um Fiona Vera gray women on porn looking at kind of try

ing to dig down into some of that data about um why are women searching for lesbian material are they all lesbians or is there something else that's drawing women to girl on girl material away from straight heteronormative porn um um and one of the suggestions so she's she's um interviewed a hundred women so it's a relatively small sample in the grand scheme of things but one of the suggestions is that women are looking at girl on girl porn because it's less stereotypically violent and aggressiv

e and I'm not an expert on that area but that seems to make sense to me as a woman and as somebody who spent quite a lot of time on PornHub in the last few weeks looking at what people are looking at um so you know you might have seen in that list as well there's a there's a category that's you know porn for women which doesn't seem to be that popular um so so the the big porn providers are not producing content for women we're not their target market um and we don't know enough about what we ne

ed to be producing but certainly there are alternatives I think that plays into that recommendation engine piece of the more you see on the larger providers yeah that is about not necessarily the mistreatment of women but the disregard for what women want the more you're going to create a space where aggression and dismissal is the norm yeah it's a very interesting area isn't it as you wish to preserve people's secrecy it becomes more and more difficult to customize content absolutely absolutely

now as usual time is pressed upon us and gram has very strict rules on such things which I've already broken uh so marvelous lecture covered a whole load of topics that we would never normally cover for which I thank you most profusely thank you thank you very much thank you