Facebook asks Australians to ‘send nudes’ to help prevent revenge porn

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Efforts to stem the online spread of “revenge porn” in Australia has been getting a helping hand from Facebook.

The social media company has partnered with an Australian Government agency to create a strategy which would help prevent users from uploading inappropriate photos and videos as a form of revenge, reports Australian Broadcasting Company.

This strategy developed by Facebook would involve training its system to automatically flag specific photos and videos of a person when it has been uploaded without consent. To do this, Facebook requested users to message themselves on Messenger with “intimate” photos.

“It would be like sending yourself your image in email,” said e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant.

By sending the photo through Messenger, Facebook’s system can learn the “hash” or digital fingerprint of the photo. If anything similar to it gets uploaded, the content immediately gets blocked.

To clarify, Facebook will not store any of the images in their servers, so there’s no database of random people’s nude photos to hack and expose to the world.

“They’re not storing the image, they’re storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies,” explained Grant.

One out of five Australian women between the ages of 18 and 45 become the victim of “revenge porn.” This happens when relationships go sour and intimate photos surface online as a way to get back at the former romantic partner.

Grant added, “We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly.” Alfred Bayle/JB

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