UPDATED 22:27 EDT / NOVEMBER 07 2017

APPS

Facebook wants your nude pictures to tackle revenge porn. Really.

To reduce the instance of revenge porn appearing on its platform, Facebook Inc. has come up with a novel plan: It’s asking people to send in nude pictures of themselves so it can ensure they won’t be posted online.

The pilot is only taking place in Australia at the moment, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp., which first reported the story. The process involves a couple of steps. First, the victim will have to contact them Australian e-safety commissioner’s website and explain the transgression, or possible transgression. Users will then be asked to start a conversation with themselves in Messenger, upload a nude shot and then flag the image as a “non-consensual intimate image.”

The image will then be “hashed,” which means it’s converted to a unique digital fingerprint. If anyone else decides to upload the image — say, a disgruntled lover — it will be blocked by Facebook. The move is supposed to be a preemptive measure against what Australia’s e-safety commissioner, Julia Inman Grant, called “image-based abuse.”

“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,” Inman told ABC.

Posting pictures of one’s naked body obviously could make some people feel vulnerable. Facebook said that after an analyst has viewed the image, it will be deleted forever. But will it really be deleted? That’s not clear.

Speaking to Motherboard, digital forensics expert Lesley Carhart said that there will be forensic evidence somewhere. “My specialty is digital forensics and I literally recover deleted images from computer systems all day — off disk and out of system memory,” she said. “It’s not trivial to destroy all trace of files, including metadata and thumbnails.”

In April, Facebook announced new tools to prevent the dissemination of revenge porn on the platform, which consisted of more avenues to report certain posts and also ensuring removed posts don’t appear again by dint of Facebook’s image recognition technology.

It’s thought that about 4 percent of people in the U.S. have been a victim of revenge porn on the Internet, including as much as 10 percent of women under the age of 30. Users in Australia for now could prevent an instance of their becoming a victim of revenge porn, but this will not stop the image from appearing somewhere else on the internet. However, a spokesperson from Facebook told The Guardian that the company was currently looking for more partners and countries.

Image: Dennis Skley via Flickr

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