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

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.