She was careful online, but this Toronto teen was still targeted with deepfake porn
CBC
One of the worst things that can happen to a person, according to Ruby, a 16-year-old from Toronto, is to find a nude picture of yourself on the internet.
And that's exactly what happened to her, through no fault of her own.
"Suddenly I was in that worst-case scenario," she said.
CBC News is not revealing Ruby's last name because she was a victim of a worrying new trend — sexually explicit deepfakes of minors.
A deepfake is any image or video that has been altered or created, often using artificial intelligence, that is difficult to distinguish from the real thing.
Last year, Ruby got a series of messages from someone saying there were images of her online, asking her to click a link to see them. She asked to see them, and was sent a deepfake of herself, topless. The original photo, in which she was fully clothed, had been taken when she was 13.
Ruby had been taught how to be safe online and she doesn't post under her real name.
"I didn't do anything wrong," she said. "It just happened… I was filled with a lot of anger."
"I have no idea who this person is."
Ruby's parents called Cybertip.ca, a national hotline for people to report sexually explicit images of minors. It processed 4,000 of sexually explicit deepfakes in the past year, the first year it starting tracking numbers.
The problem "has continued to grow and evolve," said Lindsay Lobb, the operations director of support services at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which runs Cybertip.ca.
The deepfakes are often used to extort, harass or bully minors, she says, and are easy to make because of the many sites and apps that will "nudify" an image.
There have been some high-profile cases of sexually explicit deepfakes circulating in Canadian and U.S. high schools.
In Canada, any sexual explicit image of a minor, deepfake or not, is illegal and considered child pornography. Online and social media platforms say they report images found on their sites to police.
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