Facebook Wants You To Upload Nudes Of Yourself To Stop Revenge Porn
What could possibly go wrong?
Facebook’s asking users to send in their nudes, as part of a trial of a new system to prevent revenge porn.
Say… what? Sending your nudes to social media in a bid to prevent your nudes appearing without your consent on social media seems counterintuitive, but Facebook reckons there’s a solid plan behind it.
The system is being trialled in Australia at the moment in partnership with a government agency, and works like this: if you’re worried that intimate photos of you will be shared online, you can report your concern to the Office of the E-Safety Commissioner (the government agency). They will then tell you to send the nudes to yourself on Facebook, and will let Facebook know you’ve done this.
On Facebook’s end, they’ll hash the image and then delete it. Hashing basically means they’re turning it into a unique digital fingerprint, or a bunch of data about the image, which can then be used to compare it to other images for similarity. If anyone else tries to upload the same image to Facebook, it’ll be automatically blocked.
In other words, as e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told ABC News, “they’re not storing the image, they’re storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies.”
“So if somebody tried to upload that same image, which would have the same digital footprint or hash value, it will be prevented from being uploaded.”
So far, responses from experts have been mixed. Hany Farid, a computer science professor at Dartmouth University who helped develop similar technology, told The Guardian it’s “a terrific idea”, though he acknowledged it would not stop people from uploading nudes outside of Facebook — a significant limitation.
Others, however, have expressed serious concerns about the amount of trust the system requires users to put in Facebook. Digital forensics expert Lesley Carhart told Motherboard that even though Facebook say they won’t keep the original images, totally and irrevocably deleting things is much, much easier said than done, leaving a chance that the original pictures you upload could be recovered or accessed.
Why on earth would you send your naked photos to Facebook? Better yet, who signed off on this liability magnet?!https://t.co/lZVzBaR02d
— Jake Williams (@MalwareJake) November 7, 2017
Facebook, Twitter and other sites have been using similar hashing technology to identify images containing child abuse or extremist content for several years. It’s worth noting that Facebook already has mechanisms for reporting revenge porn without preemptively sending them the images. Users can report images they see on the platform as revenge porn, which will lead to a similar hashing system being used to prevent those images being uploaded again.
If you’re concerned about revenge porn and want to learn more about how to protect yourself, there’s more information available at the Office of the E-Safety Commissioner’s site here.