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Facebook To Fight Revenge Porn by Letting Potential Victims Upload Nudes in Advance (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by msmash on from the catch-me-if-you-can dept.

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Facebook is testing new technology that is designed to help victims of revenge porn acts. It works on a database of file hashes, a cryptographic signature computed for each file. Facebook says that once an abuser tries to upload an image marked as "revenge porn" in its database, its system will block the upload process. This will work for images shared on the main Facebook service, but also for images shared privately via Messenger, Facebook's IM app. The weird thing is that in order to build a database of "revenge porn" file hashes, Facebook will rely on potential victims uploading a copy of the nude photo in advance. This process involves the victim sending a copy of the nude photo to his own account, via Facebook Messenger. This implies uploading a copy of the nude photo on Facebook Messenger, the very same act the victim is trying to prevent. The victim can then report the photo to Facebook, which will create a hash of the image that the social network will use to block further uploads of the same photo.

27 of 370 comments (clear)

  1. This is already avaliable by pnutjam · · Score: 5, Funny

    I already have a service that handles this, just send me the pic and I'll handle it....

    --
    Cheap storage VM.
    1. Re:This is already avaliable by Major_Disorder · · Score: 4, Funny

      I already have a service that handles this, just send me the pic and I'll handle it....

      I would take you up on this offer. But I would not want to be responsible your your blindness.

      --
      First law of people: People are generally stupid.
    2. Re:This is already avaliable by cayenne8 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I have a QUICK solution to all this, works 100%.

      Don't fucking let someone take pictures or video of you naked and/or having sex!!!!

      Sheesh....when did something like common sense about not letting someone take pics of you in compromising situations go out the fucking door?

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    3. Re:This is already avaliable by computational+super · · Score: 4, Funny

      I swear I'm only storing the hash code. Honest.

      --
      Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
    4. Re:This is already avaliable by computational+super · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, I thought it was really just that easy until I realized that the reason nobody had ever taken a naked picture of me was because I was ugly.

      --
      Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
    5. Re:This is already avaliable by religionofpeas · · Score: 5, Funny

      "We've noticed your hash is kinda small. Would you be interested in some hash-enlargement pills ?"

    6. Re:This is already avaliable by Lab+Rat+Jason · · Score: 4, Funny

      Right? There's NO WAY this could ever go wrong. Nobody from Facebook will ever see them. Nobody will ever hack facebook and steal them, facebook will never sell them to plastic surgeons under a marketing plan for people that need a little "nip" here and there. </sarcasm>

      --
      Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
    7. Re:This is already avaliable by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, I thought it was really just that easy until I realized that the reason nobody had ever taken a naked picture of me was because I was ugly.

      Don't feel so down on yourself. I've taken plenty of naked pictures of you.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    8. Re:This is already avaliable by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 4, Insightful

      yup 100% of the time it will work. except the times where it doesn't like when someone has hidden a camera in a bathroom or hotel room or their bedroom...

      Or they accidentally upload the photo to their feed instead of the protection service.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    9. Re:This is already avaliable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      This reminds me of that website where you could enter you credit card number to check if it was leaked to the internet....

    10. Re:This is already avaliable by computational+super · · Score: 5, Funny

      Dad?

      --
      Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
    11. Re:This is already avaliable by AdamStarks · · Score: 4, Funny

      A different breed of revenge porn, eh? Where the subject is not the victim?

    12. Re:This is already avaliable by boudie2 · · Score: 5, Funny

      My wife was afraid of the dark. Then she saw me naked. Now she's afraid of the light.
      Rodney Dangerfield

    13. Re:This is already avaliable by greenfruitsalad · · Score: 4, Informative

      Also, in UK, Facebook could be charged with possession of child pornography and the teen uploading the photo with distribution

    14. Re: This is already avaliable by Falconnan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Has said every aging generation to every up-and-coming generation since time immemorial. A large part of the problem is puritanical culture, frankly. Nudity should not be as big a deal as it is.

    15. Re:This is already avaliable by plopez · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Compromising position? Just do what I do, do not consider them compromising.

      WTF is wrong with people? Showing war movies or action movies where people get blown away is OK, but if you were to show a married couple having sex to create a child it would be considered "dirty".

      We live in a death culture.

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    16. Re:This is already avaliable by Tuidjy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I would also take you up on that offer. But could you please explain to me, first, how you deal with the things with which Facebook clearly does not:
      - how do you avoid charges of moving and storing child porn if the user is underage?
      - how do you make sure that minor changes to the original picture do not produce completely different signatures?
      - how do you make sure that none of your employees have access to the originals?
      - how do you make sure people upload only pictures in which they are the subject?
      - how do you make sure that the mechanism is not used to suppress legitimate pictures?
      - etc, etc, etc.

      What could possibly go wrong?!

      --
      No good deed goes unpunished...
  2. What could possibly go wrong? by Major_Disorder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I know they "claim" they will not keep the pictures, but only a hash of the image. But do you really trust Facebook that much?

    --
    First law of people: People are generally stupid.
    1. Re:What could possibly go wrong? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They should allow the potential victim to upload the hash, and not the image.

    2. Re: What could possibly go wrong? by lgw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The point is that facebook would need to store more than just a hash to accomplish their goal -- they need ways to deal with the image being scaled, rotated, run through a filter, etc. In other words... they need to keep a likeness of the original image.

      There are simple image signature algorithms that are stable across all those transformations (unless the filter is extreme), but will still make random collisions unlikely. Old technology at this point.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  3. Why not a Porn version of Wikipedia? by Hylandr · · Score: 4, Funny

    What's wrong with putting all the nudes of every person on facebook on a database ?

    What could go Equifax?

    --
    ~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
  4. Why not compute hash locally? by pz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The public reaction to this is understandably somewhat muted and off-put. Why upload nude photos to Facebook, indeed? The claim is that they will compute a hash of the image, and store that to prevent future uploads.

    If that is really the case, when why not compute the hash locally on the user's machine, and upload only the hash? Surely that can be done on essentially all modern hardware from cell phone to desktop in a reasonable amount of time.

    --

    Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
    1. Re:Why not compute hash locally? by swillden · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If that is really the case, when why not compute the hash locally on the user's machine, and upload only the hash?

      Cool. I hate CNN's fake news. I'm going to write a script that takes every image from every CNN story and uploads the hashes. Sharing of CNN stories on Facebook is going to be shut down.

      s/CNN/whatever you hate/

      The obvious corollary here is that Facebook needs not just the hashes but also the original image, so they can determine whether it's a real nude photo. Algorithms can do that pretty well, so Facebook may be able to arrange that no human ever needs to see the image... but there's no way for the uploader to be certain that's what they're doing.

      Also, the "hash" probably needs to be something a bit more image-focused than, say, SHA256. Otherwise any trivial modification of the image would change the hash. So it's got to be something that survives scaling, cropping, resolution changes, watermarking, etc. Which means that if the exact algorithm leaks, people can reverse engineer it to figure out how to work around it. That's another reason they need to do the hashing on their end.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  5. Simpler solution by religionofpeas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If you don't want your nudes to end up on the internet, don't send them to other people.

    1. Re:Simpler solution by hesiod · · Score: 5, Informative

      Oh. Another idiot. What about the ones others took, without you being aware

      If someone else took the picture and the victim is unaware, the target probably doesn't have a copy to upload preemptively.

  6. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  7. Re:Yeah, about that by Dwedit · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are much better methods of hashing images than stupidly taking a file checksum, such as this one here:
    https://pippy360.github.io/tra...

    This algorithm here does not care about affine transformations applied to the image, so it can be scaled, rotated, skewed, and still be a match.