Busted: Porn detection stick does what it says on the tin

While roughly half of humans will tell you they were already born with a porn detection stick, a company is marketing a device that purports to offer a “robust illicit image detection device designed to protect your family, business or organization.”

If finding out that someone besides yourself is looking at porn on a computer is the kind of thing you do in lieu of hobbies or other constructive things, for a mere $100 you too can own Paraben’s “Porn Detection Stick.” Employing “different algorithms that look at things such as flesh tones, shapes, facial recognition, and more,” the anti-porn stick compiles these instances and marks them “suspect” or “highly suspect.” However, I think this aspect of the copy is highly telling about the whole exercise of covertly rooting out porn viewing:

Images that are determined to be suspect can easily be a false positive hit. This means there are elements in the image that triggered enough suspicion for it to be categorized as suspicious. You’ll notice many of these pictures are of people who have a larger amount of skin showing (pictures of babies often get marked as suspicious) or contain a lot of flesh tones (a picture of a cardboard box may be marked as a false positive) or even have round or elongated shapes. Sometimes it’s not obvious why an image is marked as a false positive.

A lot of people look at straight up porn. But some people come across it incidentally on the internet. And a lot of what people look at online to get their rocks off won’t read as “porn” to lots of other people. (Foot fetishes, pregnancy fetishes, leather or latex kinks, for instance.) On the surface, I can only think of two instances in which this kind of technology would be used- suspect employees and suspect significant others. However, output is much more indicative of an employee’s worth than what they look at during their downtime and it’s not really anyone’s place to tell their spouse or partner not to look at dirty pictures on the interwebs. Basically, if you buy this thing, you’re a paranoid jerk. (And very likely to harass someone for an errant Evony banner ad.)

Besides, for just $50 I will accurately tell you that every male you know is looking at computer porn. I take PayPal or cash, no personal checks.

[ProofPronto via ChipChick]