Mark Zuckerberg Wants to See You Naked to ‘Combat Revenge Porn’ on Facebook
Facebook is launching a new program to proactively combat revenge porn.
“This week, Facebook is testing a proactive reporting tool in partnership with an international working group of safety organizations, survivors, and victim advocates, including the Australian Office of the eSafety Commissioner, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and The National Network to End Domestic Violence in the US, the UK Revenge Porn Helpline, and YWCA Canada,” said Antigone Davis, Global Head of Safety for Facebook.
It sounds like a bad comedy sketch, but the plan involves sending your nude photos to the tech giant, where they will create a hash – a digital fingerprint – which will be stored for safekeeping. If, by chance, one of your photographs is subsequently uploaded to Facebook or Instagram (which is owned by Facebook), the program will stop the photo from uploading.
“Users will upload pictures to a ‘secure, one-time upload link,’ which will then be reviewed by a ‘handful of specially trained members of our Community Operations Safety Team,’ said Facebook.
Who are these people? How did were they selected for the nudie review committee? Can they really be trusted to protect your most private photos?
The answer is no.
This is almost a good idea, except for the fact that you are required to send your nude photographs to Facebook’s notoriously exploitable data bank. If you thought sending nude photographs to an intimate partner was a mistake, sending them to the strangers at Facebook will almost certainly be worse.
As Big League Politics reported, Facebook data was breached for use by Democrats in the 2012 election:
“An Obama 2012 campaign veteran confirms that Facebook allowed Obama to mine the data of users because “they were on our side.”
This revelation cements the fears of many conservatives who believe that Facebook — a so-far unshakable monopoly on content publishing — is in the process of purging conservative and liberty-minded viewpoints ahead of the 2020 election.”
Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis company, was also allowed to access the data of 87 million Facebook users in during the 2016 election, allegedly on behalf of the Trump campaign.
“It’s demeaning and devastating when someone’s intimate images are shared without their permission, and we want to do everything we can to help victims of this abuse,” said Davis. “This is one step to help people who fear an intimate image will be shared without their consent. We look forward to learning from this pilot and further improving our tools for people in devastating situations like these.”
Despite the benign pitch, Big League Politics has a bit of advice inspired by common sense: Don’t be an idiot. If you are planning on sharing explicit photos, refrain from sharing them with Facebook.
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