【Historical Archives】

It's hard out there for a sexter. Living life fast,Historical Archives easy, and one poorly lit pic at a time sure sounds like fun, but what happens when the hackers come a' knocking? Your unmentionables end up on the deep web, that's what.

Unless, if headline-grabbing ad copy is to be believed, you just so happen to be using the latest in salaciousness-enabling app technology. Dubbed Nude, the iOS app released last week as a public beta promises to lock down any and all sensitive photos you may have on your smartphone camera roll. And, because a sexter is nothing if not lazy, Nude insists it will do all the work for you — scanning your photos and deciding which ones need that extra layer of security.

Here's how, according to the Oakland-based company behind the app, the subscription service is supposed to work:

"Once our proprietary technology analyzed your camera roll and detected sensitive material, they are then imported into the app, deleted from your camera roll, and erased from iCloud," the iTunes page explains. "Best of all, analysis and storage of your sensitive material are all done locally on your phone and nothing touches cloud!"

A secure, password-protected folder on your camera roll is actually a great idea, and there are already apps out there that claim to do just that. Where the self-proclaimed "sexiest app ever" differs is that it purports to take the hard work out of manually scrolling through your (presumed) years and years of fleshly snapshots to decide which need to be hidden and which are OK to be accidentally seen by your friends when they're peeping your latest vacation pics on your phone.

So how well does Nude actually work? According to the very few reviews on iTunes (remember, it was just released last week) the results are mixed. Two out of the three comments posted at time of writing find some form of fault in the nude-detection aspect of the app.

"App has promise and the automatic feature can be useful in theory but this app filtered out dozens and dozens of pictures of my dog (a 13lb chihuahua mix) and a ton of bare arm and leg shots," reads one such review. "It did seem to work on real nudes but going through so many false detections is quite a bit of work."

What does Nude have to say about this? YC Chen, a company founder, explained via email that he'd rather be safe than sorry.

"There will always be some borderline false positive, and we are leaning towards catch-them-all rather than failing to detect some sensitive content," he noted. "With that being said, we do recommend all our users update their iPhone to iOS11 before installing our app. CoreML has proven to be the most accurate when running our ML model, unfortunately Apple makes it so that CoreML would only work on iOS 11."

When pressed as to how, exactly, Nude trained its machine learning model to detect nudes (millions of dick picks?) Chen noted that "we built web scraping tools to scrape the web for representative images that we used to train the ML model." 

We wanted to try it out ourselves, and so happily downloaded Nude (free for a one month trail, 99 cents a month after that) and started snapping away (nothing below the belt, though). The app recognized photos of a desk and a window as SFW, but mistakenly categorized a blurry arm pic as "sensitive content." Sadly, there was no chihuahua mix nearby to photograph.

In the end, Nude's claimed ability to scan and detect NSFW pictures feels like a bit of a gimmick to make it stand out above all the other secure photo storage apps. Which, well, that's totally fine. However, paying a monthly subscription just to keep photos of your privates away from unsuspecting camera-roll scrollers? That's a bit much.

There are much cheaper ways to do this, and they won't confuse your dog for your, well, you get the idea.

This story has been updated to include comments from Chen about Nude's machine learning model.