Are you going to send your nude photos to Facebook?

The Guardian reports,

Roughly 4% of US internet users have been victims of revenge porn, according to a 2016 report from the Data & Society Research Institute. The proportion rises to 10% when dealing with women under the age of 30.

…Facebook is asking users to send the company their nude photos in an effort to tackle revenge porn, in an attempt to give some control back to victims of this type of abuse.

Individuals who have shared intimate, nude or sexual images with partners and are worried that the partner (or ex-partner) might distribute them without their consent can use Messenger to send the images to be “hashed”. This means that the company converts the image into a unique digital fingerprint that can be used to identify and block any attempts to re-upload that same image.

Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth who helped develop PhotoDNA, described Facebook’s pilot as a “terrific idea”.

“The deployment of this technology would not prevent someone from sharing images outside of the Facebook ecosystem, so we should encourage all online platforms to participate in this program, as we do with PhotoDNA,” he said.

A Facebook spokeswoman said the company was exploring additional partners and countries.

Read more here.