We humans are a horny species, and we are surrounded by cameras. That’s led to a world where pop stars dump their own nudes to shut down paparazzi and jilted exes and abusers take “revenge” by posting nude pictures of their targets on social media. Facebook has been trying to fight it, and now they’ve taken the unusual step of asking users to send nudes.
The Guardian reports that in Australia, Facebook will essentially mark your nudes as “do not post.” You privately send the nude images in question to Australia’s e-safety commission, which then passes them on to Facebook. Facebook then assigns that image a unique fingerprint, called a “hash,” that allows it to instantly identify it and keep it from being posted. Of course, one does have to ask both how many people are willing to send the government photos of their dangly bits, and what, precisely, this national government and this multinational corporation will do with this database of dangly bits. The last time a major government had access to a massive collection of our naked pictures, it played out exactly the way you’d expect.
Another question worth asking, as well, is why Facebook can’t just start providing hashes for users, no questions asked. These are extremely easy to generate and in fact, you can easily find automated tools online to do it yourself. Furthermore, stealing photos from users is an epidemic problem on Facebook, serving as the foundation of fake accounts churning out fake news posts to collect likes and profit off Google ads. Letting users hash every image they put on the site and put a set of rights on it would go a long way towards protecting users, making Facebook safer and less abusive, and otherwise improving quality of life on the site.
A cynic might reply that this would take control of the content Facebook demands that you feed it away from the site and return it to the users actually turning out said content. But until Facebook offers their own explanation, we’ll just be curious as to why this method isn’t put in place.
(via The Guardian)