In the most ironic move of the century, Facebook wants to help protect your privacy. The social media monolith has gotten together with the Australian Office of the eSafety Commissioner to create a new initiative to help stop the spread of revenge porn, by having you send it straight to their servers.
The idea is basically that if you are worried that someone is going to spread your nudes around Facebook, you preemptively upload the picture to Facebook (by sending it to yourself in Messenger), and Facebook will then fingerprint the image, to prevent it being circulated on the internet, if it is ever uploaded.
Here’s the full procedure:
- If you’re worried about an image of you being uploaded to the internet, you can contact the eSafety Commissioner and fill out a form.
- After submitting the form, you then send the picture to yourself on Facebook Messenger.
- Facebook’s Community Operations Safety team will then review the report, and create a unique fingerprint, that allows them to identify future uploads of the pictures, without keep copies of them on their servers. This does mean that at least one Facebook employee will see your nudes.
- Once the fingerprint is created, they will contact you via email and delete the image(s) from their servers, and you’ll be prompted to delete the photo that you’ve sent to yourself.
- The digital fingerprint is stored, so that anytime someone tries to upload an image with the same fingerprint, it can be blocked from appearing on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
So yes, at least one Facebook employee will see your nudes if you choose to participate, and yes, Facebook has a shady past when it comes to privacy. However, this initiative is done in partnership with the Australian eSafety Commissioner whose sole job is to protect people’s privacy, and it is a government organisation, so the shadiness component is reduced by at least 50%. The fingerprint they create when you upload the picture is unreadable to humans, so it’s only a one-time review conducted by a “specially trained representative”, not some sort of ploy for Facebook to compile the entire worlds nudes for them to have a geez at whenever the mood strikes them.
If this initiative is something you think could help you, you can start the process by heading to the esafety commissioners website.
Would you send you nudes to Facebook to stop others posting them? Comment below!
