Former head of eBay Trust and Safety Rob Chesnut said he got the same sinking feeling about deepfakes that he had when he saw his first phishing email when working for the online marketplace in the early 2000s. He shared his concern in a recent post on LinkedIn where he linked to an article in Gizmodo published on February 9, 2024.
The publication cited a case of a finance worker who was duped out of $25 million with a deepfake video of his boss. “It was a shocking case that showed how deepfake technology is blurring the lines of reality,” it stated.
In a bulletin published in 2020, the government provided the following explanation of deepfakes:
“What is it? A deepfake is a video, photo, or audio recording that seems real but has been manipulated with AI. The underlying technology can replace faces, manipulate facial expressions, synthesize faces, and synthesize speech. Deepfakes can depict someone appearing to say or do something that they in fact never said or did.”
The report also explained why deepfakes can be dangerous:
“Deepfakes are powerful tools that can be used for exploitation and disinformation. Deepfakes could influence elections and erode trust but so far have mainly been used for non-consensual pornography. The underlying artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are widely available at low cost, and improvements are making deepfakes harder to detect.”
Chesnut didn’t address the threat deepfakes pose to ecommerce specifically, but he said deepfake detection technology was already being used by bank customer support, “and I think it’s inevitable that we’re all going to need something like this for browsers, phones, and social media sites.”
In the mid-2000s, Chesnut’s solution to phishing emails targeting eBay buyers and sellers was to introduce a “My Messages” portal. Phase one, launched in early 2005, was a read-only Inbox for members to receive information about buying, selling, and other activities and events on eBay. The second phase of My Messages launched in mid-2005 and allowed for two-way communication with eBay and with other eBay members.
eBay was able to advise users to check their My Messages for account-related messages to verify whether an email was really from eBay.
Phishing remains a problem in ecommerce, as Etsy sellers who have been targeted mercilessly through the Etsy messaging system understand all too well.
Ebay cannot keep its own House in proper order, I doubt seriously it will be able to deal with “Deepfakes” when the time comes.
How ironic. There are a lot of fakey items being sold on eBay and they refuse to do anything about that. Many counterfeits of luxury products, as well as unauthorized and unlicensed reproductions of intellectual properties. But eBay’s stupid AI bot claims there are no problems and that it can’t find anything wrong.
Before we get to the “deepfakes”, as eBray said – lets worry about the REAL fakes, the Copyright Violations (video game multi carts and Jamma boards), the fake ephemera (where they say REPRODUCTION) in the title and ALL the other issues.
Maybe, he can borrow Sir Jaime – the Worlds Greatest Magician to lend him his wand and POOF – all the fakes could dissapear!