'We’re using image matching technology to prevent non-consensual intimate images from being shared'
A pilot program is currently underway in Australia, where one in five women aged 18-45 and one in four Indigenous Australians are victims. It appears, Facebook made the right choice to test out Australian users before a much wider and or global rollout occurs.
Facebook is asking users to alert the company to any raunchy private photos that they are concerned might be uploaded by exes as “revenge porn”.
The publisher says that it will not store nude pictures but can use photo-matching technology to tag the images after they are sent via its encrypted Messenger service. It will subsequently block any attempts to post the same pictures on Facebook or Instagram, the company’s photo-sharing app.
This hashing technology has previously been used to prevent the spread of child porn online, as well as to stop violent extremist content from being shared across social media.
“We can now prevent [revenge porn] from being shared on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram,” Facebook said in a blogpost earlier this year announcing the technology. “These tools, developed in partnership with safety experts, are one example of the potential technology has to help keep people safe.
“We look forward to building on these tools and working with other companies to explore how they could be used across the industry.
Let's say you have a spiteful ex who decides to embarrass you by posting a nude photo made in private. Facebook says if you send the photo to the company first, it will make sure it never shows up on its site.
But can you trust Facebook? The company says it won't store the photos but instead create a digital footprint so that its image-matching technology can prevent any future uploading of a copy of the photograph.
The one caveat is the original image file needs to be uploaded,
That's where the system can backfire, according to digital forensics expert Lesley Carhart, who said it's not that simple to completely delete a digital photograph.
"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," Carhart told Motherboard. "My speciality 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."
Revenge porn has affected up to one in five Australian women, according to one study
Facebook is testing a system that allows users to message themselves their nude photos in an effort to combat so-called revenge porn.
It will store a "fingerprint" of images to prevent any copies of them being shared by disgruntled ex-lovers.
The trial is in Australia, where studies suggest one in five women aged 18-45 may have had image-based abuse.
But one expert says there will still be problems outside Facebook and related sites such as WhatsApp and Instagram.
Facebook said it looked forward "to getting feedback and learning" from the trial.
Revenge porn is a growing issue in Australia, according to e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who is working with Facebook on the trial.
"We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly," she told ABC News.
'Innovative'
She sought to reassure potential victims who might be concerned about proactively sending themselves intimate photos.
"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," she said.
"They're not storing the image, they're storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies."
Users wanting to take part in the trial must first file a report with the commissioner, who will in turn share it with Facebook.
Prof Clare McGlynn, an expert from Durham Law School, described it as "an innovative experiment".
"I welcome Facebook taking steps to tackle this issue, as it has often been very slow to act in the past. However, this approach is only ever going to work for a few people and when we think of the vast number of nudes taken and shared each day, this clearly isn't a solution," she told the BBC.
Graham Cluley, a security consultant, said that security would be the priority.
"Facebook knows that there will be many people concerned about how it handles such sensitive content, and I imagine they have put a good deal of thought into minimising the chances that anything goes wrong."
In March, Facebook was embroiled in a scandal when it emerged that a 30,000-strong private members group, Marine United, was routinely sharing images of nude women.
The group - made up of US marines - shared photographs of naked and semi-naked female colleagues.
In response to the revelations, Facebook introduced a feature that tagged pictures reported to it as revenge porn using photo-matching technology. It used this to prevent the image spreading and closed down the majority of accounts reported to it as hosting such images.
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