Fighting deepfakes: a “top priority” for Europol

The criminal uses of deepfakes are extremely numerous: manipulating information to the general public and businesses; perpetrating extortion and fraud; disrupting financial markets; misleading the authorities in an investigation or intervention; promoting the sexual exploitation of vulnerable people, especially children…

The Europol Innovation Lab recently devoted a report to these technologies that can falsify a person’s image and/or voice, which have been democratised by the development of generative adversarial networks: « Advances in artificial intelligence and the availability of large image and video databases mean that the volume and quality of ‘deepfake’ content is increasing, » Europol states.

For Europol, the scale of the risks means that « deepfake detection and prevention must be top law enforcement priority. » The report therefore calls on law enforcement agencies to not only upskill their workforce to detect deepfakes, but also invest in their technical capabilities, « while respecting fundamental rights. »