Social Networking sites can be helpful as well as destructive for many of us. Take an instance of revenge porn, according to a survey conducted in Australia, one in five Australian women aged 18-45 and one in four Indigenous Australians become victims of this abuse. To end such life devastating incidents, Facebook has teamed up with an Australian Government agency to prevent sexual or intimate images being shared without the subject’s consent.
Although to prevent your intimate pictures ending up on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger you must send the image to “yourself” on Messenger. Yes, Facebook is building a system where a user sending his/her nude to themselves via Messenger will use the technology to hash the images, which is a process of converting the images to unique digital codes. Facebook will then prevent those images from being uploaded to its site.
e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said that “It would be like sending yourself your image in an email, but obviously this is a much safer, secure end-to-end way of sending the image without sending it through the ether.”
However, the company will not store the image, it will store the link and deletes it after a while. “They’re not storing the image, they’re storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies,” she said.
“So if somebody tried to upload that same image, which would have the same digital footprint or hash value, it will be prevented from being uploaded.”
Antigone Davis, Facebook Head of Global Safety, said that “the safety of users and well-being of the Facebook community is our top priority.” She further explained, “As part of our continued efforts to better detect and remove content that violates our community standards, we’re using image matching technology to prevent non-consensual intimate images from being shared on Facebook. These tools, developed in partnership with global safety experts, are one example of how we’re using new technology to keep people safe and prevent harm.”
The hashing technology has been already used by other tech companies to abolish the internet of child pornography. Some people even got arrested for distributing exploitative images on Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. These companies also used unique digital codes to detect intimate images.
