FindThePornstar.com — The ups and downs of facial recognition

To understand where we’re coming from, we first need to share our story. Sharesome has started out as a means to help people in the adult industry by providing them with a safe haven where they could advertise their work and build a fanbase without the fear of getting banned/shadowbanned or rejected by general social media platforms.

It began as a simple social media platform, and we’ve taken on the responsibility of actually listening to our users’ requests and improving the site based on their needs. This gave us the possibility to play around with technology, which happened to be one of the biggest perks for us. Understanding how technology can be used to help, and especially to harm the adult industry was a big step for us: We discovered that it’s not about the tools you create, it’s about how you use them.

With this in mind, we’ve decided to hold a one day Hackathon and create a product using existing technology that can enable content creators to have control over their work while also helping regular folks find the pornstar they’re interested in and buy their content. We came up with #FindThePornstar, which is a a picture based facial recognition system that is run by a machine learning algorithm to detect pornstars.

The premise was simple: We would only use public information and would only work with stage names, so that no personal information would be revealed. This was an experiment that we’re glad we did, because due to this, we’ve been able to learn and understand exactly how this type of product could be both helpful and harmful. How? Let’s take it step by step.

On one hand, by using this product, content creators would now be able to search for themselves and find out if any of their content is being used or uploaded without their permission. Also, this would allow people to search for the specific content creator and find their links & paysites, thus driving traffic towards that content creator and helping them sell more of their work.

On the other hand, many privacy concerns have been raised, with people rising against it saying that they don’t want to be found. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to worry about, especially if you have retired and want to move on, or work in the camming industry and simply don’t want to advertise it; and the list could go on and on.

In the wrong hands, this technology could be used to expose people and do more damage than good; and if a small team of 20 people could complete a project like this in one single day, imagine the endless possibilities of what this technology can do. Keep in mind, this isn’t anything new that hasn’t been done before, there are literally dozens of similar sites and even big platforms (not naming any names, you already know them) that already use this type of technology for their own benefit.

Our main goal, from the very start, was to help the adult industry and give the people working in it certain benefits that they otherwise wouldn’t get from general social media platforms. And we had the same intention with #FindThePornstar. And the key to this is to listen to your community.

This is exactly why we plan on taking everything we’ve learned from you and applying it in everything we build.

We’re going to temporarily shut down #FindThePornstar and keep working on it in order to make sure that this tool will be just this: a tool that can help content creators who want to promote their content get credit, make more from their work and gain more engagement.

This will, of course, involve the option to completely opt out of appearing in the search engine. We believe that it is your right to decide whether you want to be found or not.

We won’t stop working on improving ourselves and our products, and we’ll never lose sight of what’s important: to continue building tools to empower pornstars, cam models and their fans.

Please follow @FindThePornstar on Sharesome & Twitter and join the discussion at #FindThePornstar Topic in Sharesome. Help us to turn this into something that will help you to protect your content and make more out of it!