What could possibly go wrong?

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Facebook is testing a new preemptive revenge porn defense in Australia that may, at first blush, feel counterproductive: uploading your nude photos or videos directly to Messenger. According to the Australia Broadcasting Corporation, Facebook has partnered with the office of the Australian government’s e-Safety Commissioner, which works primarily to prevent the online abuse of minors, to develop the new system for combating the nonconsensual sharing of explicit media.

By uploading the images or videos you fear may be shared in the future in an attempt to shame or harass you online, Facebook can digitally “hash” the media, effectively giving it a digital footprint. This allows the social network to track the media using the same artificial intelligence-based technologies it uses in its photo and face matching algorithms, and then prevent it from being uploaded and shared in the future. This works only if you’re in possession of the original file, but it would seem to bypass any attempts from a malicious third party to alter the metadata by analyzing and tagging the actual content of the image or video.

Facebook first implemented a similar, although less preemptive, mechanism for preventing the proliferation of revenge porn back in April, with the implementation of a photo-matching system to prevent the spread of images that have already been reported and taken down. The company has also liberally banned accounts for revenge porn activities. But now Facebook seems to be asking users to think ahead and play it safe if they feel particularly vulnerable, which could be the case in a relationship that becomes abusive over time or only after it’s ended.

"We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly," e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told ABC. “They're not storing the image. They're storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies. 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.”

Of course, there are a few concerns here worth mentioning. Although Facebook is using a hashing system to avoid storing the photos or videos directly on its servers, that the company has a bad reputation with regards to privacy and consumer trust means everyday users might think uploading directly to Messenger is a the equivalent of posting revenge porn against themselves. And because it’s just a test right now, there’s no telling whether the system can be easily tricked by altering aspects of the photo, sometimes in subtle and even imperceptible ways, to trick Facebook’s filters.

Successful attempts at tricking machine vision systems are well documented. Hackers and researchers alike have been known to use what are called “adversarial images” that use digital manipulations to trick AI algorithms, either by making a facial recognition system think someone looks like someone else, or by forcing a piece of image recognition software to think it’s looking at an one object that is in reality just a noisy mess of geometric shapes. It’s not farfetched to think Facebook’s automatic revenge porn filtering system could be bypassed in similar ways, by inserting enough hidden data in between the lines of an image to make it seem different enough from the source to the eyes of an algorithm.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Update at 5:02PM ET, 11/7: Clarified that Facebook’s hashing system means it can recognize files without needing explicit access to them on its servers.

Anthony Weiner Beta testing it?

Not to mention that the Facebook Porn Archive would become the target of most every hacker everywhere.

For your own safety, please submit any material you think may be used at any time in the present or future to blackmail or embarrass you. It's ok, we never, ever get hacked, or mishandle sensitive information, plus, you can trust us.

WTF?! How can anybody with even half a functioning brain believe that's a good idea?

How about if a minor uploaded this content of themselves in the US it is more likely than not going to technically be child porn trafficking?

Wait....There is pornography on the internet???

quote:

Originally posted by craglawnmanor:
Wait....There is pornography on the internet???

It makes up > 50% of the total internet traffic

Someone at facebook is about to get a ton of dick pics

Harvey Weinstein has probably already submitted his resume for the position of managing editor.

Whatever

Posturing bullshit

Todays important tip:
Never let anyone, for any reason, photograph you nekkid.
War story:
Long before the days of intergoogle, my partner arrested some residential burglars. Among the recovered items was a photo album filled with Poloroid photos of a man and woman. Nude and doing various things. We enjoyed the photos immensely. In fact, in an effort to return the album to the proper owner, we posted one of the males photo on our roll call bulletin board with the caption:
"Does anyone recognize this dick"?
And yes, we eventually identified the albums owner and returned it. Even the bulletin board photo.

quote:

Originally posted by craglawnmanor:
Wait....There is pornography on the internet???

That always reminds me of Quagmire.