Facebook to users: Upload your nude photos and we will save you from revenge porn

Facebook to users: Upload your nude photos and we will save you from revenge porn

Facebook created a buzz last year when news surfaced that it was adopting an unconventional approach towards combating revenge porn that involved users to uploading their nude photos on to the company's servers. The pilot program was launched in Australia last November in collaboration with a government agency on e-safety. And now the social media giant's Global Safety division is expanding the program to the US, UK, and Canada.

In a Facebook post, company's Global Head of Safety, Antigone Davis shared that the social media giant was "partnering with safety organizations on a way for people to securely submit photos they fear will be shared without their consent, so we can block them from being uploaded to Facebook, Instagram and Messenger".

For simplicity, Facebook is asking people to upload their nude photos on its servers so that it can scan through those images to see if any of those images are being shared on Facebook, Messenger or Instagram. If they find a match, the company will stop those images from being uploaded or shared on its platform.

Uploading your nude images on Facebook might seem like an odd and rather risky move given that the company CEO Mark Zuckerberg is still heading to congressional and parliamentary hearing sessions across the globe to explain the details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal wherein the private data of 87 million users were exposed, however, the company does have proper plan in place to tackle this menace from growing on its platform.

For starters, once users send their nude photos to Facebook, they will be viewed by a handful of "specifically trained members" of its staff who will create a unique fingerprint or hash of these images. In effect, this will allow the company to identify if these images get uploaded on its platform in the future without keeping a copy of the same on its servers. For reference, a hash is a numerical representation of a file that cannot be read by humans.

Once the company creates a hash, the victim will be notified via an email and the actually image will be deleted from Facebook's servers within seven days. The company, however, will store the hash so that it can prevent the image from being uploaded on to any of its services in future.

But how do we know that Facebook will deliver on its promise and not misuse this sensitive information? Well, there is no reason to believe that the company would ever act carelessly with such a sensitive information especially in light of the its recent controversy. And as a measure of caution, the company is partnering with international working group of safety organizations including the Australian Office of the e-Safety Commissioner, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and The National Network to End Domestic Violence in the US, the UK Revenge Porn Helpline, and YWCA Canada for introducing this tool.

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Davis says that this program is a step towards helping people who fear an intimate image will be shared without their consent. "We look forward to learning from this pilot and further improving our tools for people in devastating situations like these," he wrote in the post.