Last November, Facebook proposed what sounded like a bizarre new idea to help combat the spread of “revenge porn” on the social media mega-platform: asking users to upload nude photos of themselves through the Facebook Messenger app. According to the Facebook proposal, each nude selfie uploaded by a user would be analyzed by a Facebook employee, who then creates a digital “fingerprint” of the revealing image.
If anyone else uploads a similar nude photo without the subject's consent, a Facebook algorithm would then catch it, and delete the image for violating the site’s revenge porn policy.
Even though Facebook promised that the voluntary nude uploads would be seen only by a “very small team” of analysts, and would not be stored on Facebook servers, the idea was met with understandable skepticism.
Revelations over the past few months would seem only to have increased that skepticism. In March, a former Facebook manager in charge of the company’s effort to stop hackers and other data leaks told The Guardian newspaper that private, personal information on hundreds of millions of Facebook users had leaked, and that Facebook had no idea what happened to that sensitive user data.
Even worse, Sandy Parkilas told the paper, Facebook deliberately turned a blind eye to the problem, believing that the company would be in a better position to defend itself legally if it could plead ignorance.
“They felt that it was better not to know,” Parkilas said. “I found that utterly shocking and horrifying.”
But the evident issues with Facebook data protection and privacy are not stopping the social media giant with an estimated 2.2 billion users—nearly 30 percent of the entire world’s population—from steaming ahead with the nude selfie upload program.
Earlier this week, Facebook announced that it will start its “pilot program” in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, after having operated the nude-selfie-upload process in Australia for the past six months. Facebook did not offer any information on the success rate of the Australian “pilot.”
The revenge porn, or “image abuse,” problem appears to be especially acute in Australia, with 20 percent of Australians reporting that they have been victims of unauthorized online image uploads, according to an academic survey from May of 2017. A full 50 percent of indigeneous Australians reported being victimized by “image abuse.”
Facebook’s head of global safety, Antigone Davis, announced the move in a post on Facebook earlier this week.
“People who worry that someone might want to harm them by sharing an intimate image can proactively upload it so we can block anyone else from sharing it on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger,” Davis wrote, adding that users can use a “secure, one-time upload link” to submit their images.
“This is one step to help people who fear an intimate image will be shared without their consent,” Davis wrote. “We look forward to learning from this pilot and further improving our tools for people in devastating situations like these.”
Still, security experts remain unconvinced.
“My huge concern with this program is that it turns a vulnerable user's fear of future possible harm into an actual tremendous privacy invasion,” the University of Melbourne’s Vanessa Teague told Computerworld Magazine, "sending an intimate picture to a corporation that's among the worst privacy abusers on the planet.” .
Photo by Flohuels / Wikimedia Commons
