Facebook wants to see your intimate photos
If you ever feared your most private ictures could be leaked, Facebook is testing in the United States a tool to prevent "vengeful porn" in which it proposes to share with the platform those intimate photos that the user suspects can be disseminated without their consent so that they are blocked, local media reported.
The pilot program of Facebook's "proactive" tool, which creates a "fingerprint" of the photograph to detect if it is uploaded to the network in the future, begins this week also in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, according to The New York Daily News. Antigone Davis, global head of security for the platform, said in a text on Tuesday that those "worried because someone wants to harm them by uploading an intimate image" can act so that others can´t upload it to Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
Affected users should contact the Facebook team to complete a form, and after sending them they will receive an email with a secure link that works only once and in which the images in question can be uploaded. "Qualified" members of Facebook's security team review that information and create a "single fingerprint" ("hash") that identifies future uploads of the images, said Davis, who specifies that Facebook does not store copies on its servers.
Once the hash is created, that person is notified by mail and Facebook deletes the images of the server in a maximum of seven days, so if someone tries to spread them without consent they will be "blocked" in the networks.
The platform said it expects to "learn" from the pilot program, which it has developed in collaboration with activists and organizations such as the National Network for the End of Domestic Violence in the US, the UK Revenge Porn Helpline or the Office of the Commissioner for Australian Electronic Security.
Currently, users can alert Facebook if their private photos have been uploaded without consent, after which they are eliminated and the platform saves a "fingerprint" to prevent new uploads.
This is just another measure to prevent polemics in the company. Let’s remember the social media giant recently went into the eye of a storm because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, were Facebook also had to face numerous accusations at the end of for allowing the dissemination during the presidential campaign of 2016 of false news that could have affected the intention to vote. In fact, those accusations led the company, as well as the Google search engine, to commit last November to adopt measures to stop the diffusion of news of doubtful origin by limiting its advertising.
