Nude App Wants To Help Keep Your 'Private Parts' Photos Private

After Celebgate and the Fappening, a new iOS app called Nude is trying to protect iOS users’ racy photos from another iCloud leak.

The app scans a user’s camera roll and pinpoints which photos, videos or documents include explicit content. After the AI scan, the images are locked into the app and erased to avoid hackers from getting their hands on the images.

Jessica Chiu, Y.C. Chen and Edgar Khanzandian created the Nude app, which was released Oct. 4.

“The app itself is very simple and intuitive to use,” Chiu told International Business Times. “Once our proprietary AI technology scans through your camera roll and detects sensitive material, they are then imported into the app, deleted from your camera roll, and erased from iCloud.”

Chiu says the app uses CoreML, which was introduced with iOS 11, and for versions below iOS 11, Nude uses Facebook’s Caffe2 framework to allow on-device analysis.

“That limits the opportunity for would-be hackers to get access to any sensitive photos and images,” she said about the app’s procedure. “We recommend upgrading to iOS 11 because CoreML still works more accurately in comparison to Caffe2. Unfortunately, Apple allows the CoreML framework to work with iOS 11 only.”

While it would be helpful to use an app to keep nudes safe, some might wonder about the safety of their sensitive photos. Chiu reassures users that Nude does not keep or store any photos.

“Everything from analysis to storage is locally done and nothing touches cloud -- there’s nothing safer than that,” said Chiu. “We are a serverless service. All photo analysis and storage is done locally on your phone.”

“Since everything is locally stored, in order for a hacker to actually get to anything, he/she will have to bypass the iPhone encryption first which not even the NSA or FBI can do,” Chiu said.

What Was The Fappening and Celebgate?

The creation of the Nude app comes after 2014 and 2017 incidents in which Hollywood stars had their intimate photos leaked online, dubbed “The Fappening” and “Celebgate.” Dakota Johnson, Kristen Stewart, Tiger Woods and Miley Cyrus were among the latest celebrities to fall victims of the nude photo leaks this summer. Previously, other stars, including Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, Cara Delevingne, Mary-Kate Olsen, Amber Heard, Kim Kardashian and Rihanna also had their images leaked.

Chiu, who is having her lifestory adopted to the big screen, became acquainted with actresses who brought up the issue.

“In the communities where we grew up, there have been cases of girls being blackmailed by others involving their nude images,” Chiu told IBT. “And these are the incidents that really hit home so we wanted to create a product that would give back people control of their privacy. With these insights and personal experiences, we created the Nude App to address the issue of storing and protecting nudes using AI.”

How The Nude App Works

Users can create a pin or use their device’s Touch ID to keep their nudes secure with the app. The Nude app includes in-app viewing for photos and videos and an integrated camera to take pictures directly via the app.

Nude also has a “break-in” alerts feature, where intruders who enter a wrong pin will have a secret picture taken of them, so users can see if someone was trying to snoop around.

For those who don’t take nudes, the app’s App Store listing offers other ways Nude can help safeguard important data:

- Protecting copies of your driver’s license, ID cards, and credit cards

- Keeping your important documents safe

- Preserving special memories

- Storing family photos and videos

The app is free of charge, but there is a $0.99 a month subscription. People can choose either the one-month subscription or the one-year subscription option. Users must be at least 17-years-old to download the app. The Nude app will be available for Androids on Nov. 8. For now, Android users can sign up to get notified about when it will be available.