Facebook Asks British Users To Submit Their Nudes as Protection Against Revenge Porn (betanews.com)

Mark Wilson writes: Following on from a trial in Australia, Facebook is rolling out anti-revenge porn measures to the UK. In order that it can protect British users from failing victim to revenge porn, the social network is asking them to send in naked photos of themselves. The basic premise of the idea is: send us nudes, and we'll stop others from seeing them .

Comments

April Fools is Late This Year

[Bruce Perens]

All of you actually fell for this?

Re:Redistribution of Sex

[PopeRatzo]

Citation of a specific, direct, demand with a threat please.

Since you said, "please", here you go:

Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, uploaded a video to YouTube about his “retribution” against attractive women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and the attractive men they would sleep with) before killing six people in 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And this is directly from Robin Hanson's blog:

"One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met. As with income inequality, most folks concerned about sex inequality might explicitly reject violence as a method, at least for now, and yet still be encouraged privately when the possibility of violence helps move others to support their policies. (Sex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation.)"

But really, the demand for sex with a threat of violence has been a tool of losers and incels for millennia:

https://forward.com/schmooze/4...

If none of that satisfies you, I would direct you to the /incel section of 4chan or reddit.

Have any of you ever dealt with revenge pr0n?

[Goonie]

I haven't personally, but I have spent at length with people whose job includes helping the victims of "revenge porn" (or image-based abuse, as they prefer to more accurately call it), and they have generally welcomed this development. I was at the conference was this was launched in Australia, and applause went around the room.

This is *not* intended as a general "send your nudes to Facebook and get them blocked" service. This is for a smaller group of people who have specific reason to believe that specific images are either likely to be circulated, or are already circulating in Facebook Messenger.

For people in this situation, sometimes, having a Facebook admin look at your nude pictures, while much less than ideal, is far less of a problem than letting those pictures circulate to people like your family, friends, and employer. Doing this, or threatening to do so, is a common technique of domestic abuse.

I agree with the critiques that it would be far, far better if you didn't have to send the image itself to Facebook to be hashed, but a) Facebook, not unreasonably, doesn't want the blocking service used for purposes other than that intended, b) the photo hashing technology is proprietary and they don't want it reverse-engineered if they can avoid it, and c) doing the hashing locally is going to create usability issues for users who are often not particularly technology-savvy.

I wouldn't for a minute suggest that this is a perfect system. But take your male middle-class tech geek glasses of for one fucking second and try listening to the people whom this system has been put in place to help.

Re: Ok

[ArsenneLupin]

Why can't FB issue a utility to the users to process their own images and generate a hash for the images they don't want shown?

Comparing hashes would only find exact duplicates. Just crop two pixels to the left, or make the image slightly darker or lighter would break the hash. Heck, even changing the metadata would break most hashes.

Re: Ok

[pnutjam]

Facebook says they are only storing hashes, NOT the original picture. So there's really no reason users can't create the hashes, with maybe a flag to view the image being blocked the first time the hash is matched. That would prevent abuse.