Wait! Before you send that nude photo to your new flame, Facebook wants to see it. The social network is testing a new strategy to fight revenge porn by asking users to upload their nudes and explicit photos of themselves to Facebook before pressing send on that sext.
Facebook has teamed up with the e-Safety Commissioner to protect your intimate photos in case your phone gets hacked or you and your soulmate weren’t really made for each other because your now-ex is the type of jerk who would even consider posting revenge porn.
How to protect your nudes from becoming revenge porn
All you need to do is start chatting with yourself. Before you tantalize him with those curves, send the image to yourself via Messenger and flag it “non-consensual intimate image.”
“It would be like sending yourself your image in email, but obviously, this is a much safer, secure end-to-end way of sending the image without sending it through the ether,” e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Facebook would then “hash” the photo, meaning create a digital fingerprint or a link to the image.
“They’re not storing the image; they’re storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies,” Inman Grant explained.
“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.”
The way Facebook explains it, any attempts to upload your explicit photos will be thwarted when the hacker or your ex-paramour tries to put the same image online because Facebook will have an “image” with which to compare the nude upload.
But you’re still sending a photo of a naked you across the interwebs
“Yes, they’re not storing a copy, but the image is still being transmitted and processed. Leaving forensic evidence in memory and potentially on disk,” digital forensics expert Lesley Carhart told Vice’s Motherboard. “My specialty is digital forensics and I literally recover deleted images from computer systems all day — off disk and out of system memory. It’s not trivial to destroy all trace of files, including metadata and thumbnails.”
Facebook introduced an anti-revenge porn feature in April. Once a photo is reported as revenge porn, it is tagged using photo-matching technology in the hopes of stopping it from further dissemination. Facebook “in most cases” will delete the account of the person who first shared the image, Vice reported.
As Facebook tests the new strategy out in various countries, some state laws in the United States are making sharing non-consensual explicit images a federal crime, like child porn.
The trial feature will only work to stop the spread of nude photos on Facebook, not the rest of the internet.
This woman’s nude photos were hacked. This is how she dealt with it. (Video NSFW)
Someone stole naked pictures of me. This is what I did about it – Emma Holten from HOEDINI on Vimeo.
