Revenge porn is nasty business, where your former partner shares intimate photos of you in a public space like Facebook or Twitter in an attempt to shame or humiliate you, even if it means that they could go to jail for it. Now we’ve seen social media platforms introduce ways of reporting such incidents, but usually that’s only after it has already happened.However it seems that Facebook is working on a new way to prevent revenge porn from even happening in the first place. While Facebook can’t stop you from taking nude/intimate photos and sharing them with your partner, what they can do is prevent such photos from being uploaded onto its website in the first place.
Facebook has recently teamed up with the Australian Government and are testing out a new way of detecting sexual/intimate photos and prevent them from being uploaded onto its platform. How does this work? Basically it works by pre-empting the person who is about to upload it. Users who are concerned that their intimate photos are about to be shared will have to send those photos to themselves via Messenger.
From there, Facebook will create a digital fingerprint of that photo or link, and should someone else try to upload that same image, it will be prevented. As it stands Facebook’s current method involves reporting an already-existing photo, after which the system will then remember the image and then use photo matching technology to prevent similar photos from being uploaded.
However like we said, by then it could be too late as someone else could have saved the photos or spread them already. According to e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, “They thought of many different ways about doing this and they came to the conclusion as one of the major technology companies in the world that this was the safest way for users to share the digital footprints.”
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