Facebook wants your nude photos to protect you from revenge porn
This may sound like a strange headline. But bear with us. It all makes sense with a little more context.
Revenge porn is a serious and growing problem. Its victims will see their nude photos maliciously circulated online by ex-lovers or cyber-crooks, without consent or permission. Reports of revenge porn have sky-rocketed, and given that Facebook is often the platform of choice for those looking to circulate nude photos of victims, it’s an issue that Facebook takes seriously.
As such, the social networking giant is testing a new feature that will allow potential victims of revenge porn to pro-actively protect themselves, by giving Facebook their nude photos first.
It may sound strange, but imagine the scenario. There’s a nude photo of yourself that you fear is in the possession of someone who may try and spread it on Facebook. Perhaps you took it and sent it to (what turns out to be a vindictive) ex-lover. Or perhaps you think someone stolen a nude photo from your cloud storage.
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Believing it’s only a matter of time before the compromising photo finds its way onto Facebook, you use Facebook’s revenge porn feature. What this means is that you upload the nude photo to Facebook using the feature – but you’re not actually sending the photo to anyone but yourself. Facebook’s photo-fingerprinting technologies get to work on the photo and create a unique digital footprint of the photo. It’s a process known as hashing. And with that unique footprint, Facebook can prevent anyone from uploading the same photo to Facebook.
Facebook has been clear that the photo itself is not stored anywhere on Facebook, and no one sees it, not even Facebook employees. (Updates now suggest the photo the photo may be reviewed by a Facebook employee to ensure that the photo is indeed in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.) Facebook’s algorithms turn the photo into a unique hashing code (a.k.a. the digital footprint) and then delete the photo itself.
This means if someone attempted to upload the photo to Facebook, Facebook will recognise that it’s your nude photo and prevent it from being uploaded to their site.
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Facebook has already installed a system where it can detect photos already reported on the site as revenge porn images so others cannot re-upload them to the site. But this is the first time they are inviting users to upload nude photos of themselves to pre-emptively prevent them from ever getting onto Facebook in the first place.
Despite Facebook’s assurances that the photos are not stored and won’t ever be seen by humans (Updates now suggest the photo the photo may be reviewed by a Facebook employee to ensure that the photo is indeed in violation of Facebook’s terms of service.) we can still imagine that many users will still feel somewhat reluctant to willingly upload nude photos of themselves, even if it is to a computer algorithm.
The feature is currently in the testing phase and is not available to all users yet.
What do you think? Let us know.