Facebook Asks Australian Users to Send Their Naked Photos to Crack Down on Revenge Porn

ashley.rae | November 10, 2017
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If you’re an Australian Facebook user, Facebook wants you to share your nude photos--for your own protection, of course.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports Facebook, in partnership with the Australian government, is asking for users to send their naked photos to themselves via Facebook’s Messenger feature in order to crack down on “revenge porn,” or sharing a person’s naked photos without their consent.

Julie Inman Grant, the Australian e-Safety Commissioner, explained that once the picture was sent, it would create a sort of digital footprint that could track if the image if someone attempted to post it in the future.

Inman Grant clarified Facebook would not be storing the image itself, but “they're storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies.”

Antigone Davis, the Global head of Safety for Facebook, issued a press release on the Facebook site elaborating on how their program works. Davis explained, “We store the photo hash—not the photo—to prevent someone from uploading the photo in the future. If someone tries to upload the image to our platform, like all photos on Facebook, it is run through a database of these hashes and if it matches we do not allow it to be posted or shared.”

“Once we hash the photo, we notify the person who submitted the report via the secure email they provided to the eSafety Commissioner’s office and ask them to delete the photo from the Messenger thread on their device,” Davis continued. “Once they delete the image from the thread, we will delete the image from our servers.”

This means if that an individual forgets to delete his or her nude photo, it’s still forever out there on the internet.

Facebook’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, explained:

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