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Facebook AI Privacy Social Networks

Facebook Asks British Users To Submit Their Nudes as Protection Against Revenge Porn (betanews.com) 303

Mark Wilson writes: Following on from a trial in Australia, Facebook is rolling out anti-revenge porn measures to the UK. In order that it can protect British users from failing victim to revenge porn, the social network is asking them to send in naked photos of themselves. The basic premise of the idea is: send us nudes, and we'll stop others from seeing them .
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Facebook Asks British Users To Submit Their Nudes as Protection Against Revenge Porn

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  • Ok (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ksevio ( 865461 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @05:26PM (#56661796) Homepage
    I don't see how anything could go wrong with this plan!
    • I hope they don't charge that much for the dataset on silkroad 3.1

      • Re: Ok (Score:4, Insightful)

        by aphelion_rock ( 575206 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @06:14PM (#56662098)

        I am sure there will be a few FB employees who will enjoy looking through the new FB p0rn collection.

        Why can't FB issue a utility to the users to process their own images and generate a hash for the images they don't want shown?

        • by zlives ( 2009072 )

          this negates the "new FB p0rn collection"

        • According to TFA, there are some FB employees who will be looking at a lot of naked pictures. A lot of naked pictures!

          Speaking to the BBC, Antigone Davis, Facebook's Global Head of Safety, said that nudes would be reviewed by human employees, but that this was "a very small group of about five specially trained reviewers". Images would then be hashed, and originals would not be stored.

          So I guess Zuckerberg is one of those "reviewers"? Probably he is not a "first reviewer", he only reviews the really good ones, "just to be sure".

          And then FB will have hashes of all the really good naked bodies. I am sure some useful data mining can be done with that.

        • Re: Ok (Score:5, Insightful)

          by DeVilla ( 4563 ) on Thursday May 24, 2018 @12:46AM (#56663598)

          Why can't FB issue a utility to the users to process their own images and generate a hash for the images they don't want shown?

          ... and someone will start submitting hashes of pictures that embarrass a politician they like and for pictures that show a politician from the other party in a favorable way. Unfettered access to Facebook's ban hammer.

        • Re: Ok (Score:5, Informative)

          by ArsenneLupin ( 766289 ) on Thursday May 24, 2018 @05:30AM (#56664270)

          Why can't FB issue a utility to the users to process their own images and generate a hash for the images they don't want shown?

          Comparing hashes would only find exact duplicates. Just crop two pixels to the left, or make the image slightly darker or lighter would break the hash. Heck, even changing the metadata would break most hashes.

    • So, you work for Facebook, right?

    • Apparently one of Facebooks new 'partner companies' is PornHub, LOL.
    • I don't see how anything could go wrong with this plan!

      Project director Benjamin Hill promises to personally evaluate and rank each female image. The male images will be used as bargaining chips in Hill's plan.

      He further vowed to develop a version of the show, edited for US audiences, for BBC America.

      • Project director Benjamin Hill promises to personally evaluate and rank each female image.

        Isn't that what facebook was originally made for? It's come full circle.

    • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @09:38PM (#56663028)
      I think that's the idea. Nobody submits their photos because of how creepy/stupid this is. But when Facebook gets sued for helping distribute revenge porn, they tell the judge "Your Honor (or whatever they call them in the UK), we have a system in place designed to prevent exactly this type of incident from ever happening. But the victim refused to participate. Therefore the fault is entirely hers, not ours.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        That definitely wouldn't fly in a UK court.

      • by stealth_finger ( 1809752 ) on Thursday May 24, 2018 @04:42AM (#56664124)

        ...they tell the judge "Your Honor (or whatever they call them in the UK),

        It's still your honour but spelt right. ;)

      • Well people who consider themselves at a particularly big risk of revenge porn might participate (after a nasty break-up, and where such pictures are known to exist and to indeed be in the hands of the vengeful ex). Might only be a small minority, but for these the risks of "sharing" the pictures with facebook might indeed be dwarfed by the risk of the ex to do something funny.

        All the other users don't indeed need to bother.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by wiretrip ( 552807 )
        I agree. Or maybe this is the ultimate 'dead cat' strategy. Make an outrageous demand of the users so people concentrate on that and forget all the other shit going on with FaeceBook at the moment...
  • Asking for nude photos to prevent nude photos from being posted is the second most audacious demand on the internet recently.

    The first one was when incels and Jordan Peterson demanded that women have sex with them to prevent mass murders.

    • by fuzzyf ( 1129635 )
      Jordan Peterson did not demand that at all.
      Are you stating this because you heard or read someone say so or do you fabricate stuff like this on your own?

      Slashdot is _really_ going downhill when post like yours gets modded +4.
      • Jordan Peterson did not demand that at all.

        No, he didn't demand it. He did something much worse: he excused it. He tried to create an intellectual and moral framework where such a demand is something natural instead of sociopathic. Fortunately, he lacks the intellectual firepower to do either and just made a fool of himself.,

        "Recently, a young man named Alek Minassian drove through Toronto trying to kill people with his van. Ten were killed, and he has been charged with first-degree murder for their deat

        • by fuzzyf ( 1129635 )
          How about you find the link to what Jordan Peterson actually said? with context

          I can assure you that he do not have the oppinion you assume on this matter.

          Funny how haters always link to some article with someone else posing a straw man.
  • by rutabagaman ( 120913 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @05:34PM (#56661846) Homepage
    I'm kind of shocked how tone deaf this is. If a company generally perceived as trustworthy asked the British to send them their nudes, there would be plenty of eyebrows raised. Now how trustworthy is facebook? In the UK?
    • by ColdWetDog ( 752185 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @05:37PM (#56661874) Homepage

      Perhaps they should ask for a credit card number (and expiration date / CVS) along with the naked pictures. Just to prove they're over 18. Don't want any child pornography here.

        Then it will seem totally legit.

    • Hope to never see cauliflower labia.
    • I'm kind of shocked how tone deaf this is.

      Tone deaf to whom? The potential users of the system? Or the legal system? I see this as quite a clever move in defence of potential lawsuits.

      "Your honour, Facebook was complicit in the distribution of my nudes to my parents!"
      "Your honour, I would direct you to the formal system we have in place to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening which the prosecuting party voluntarily did not use".

  • It must be April, mustn't it? I knew Zuck is a voyeur, but I never expected him to be so obvious about it.

  • by Utopia ( 149375 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @05:36PM (#56661856)

    calculate the image hashes.

    There are several libraries available to calculate image hashes that can be built into a desktop tool
    For example: https://github.com/JohannesBuc... [github.com]

  • by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @05:36PM (#56661860) Homepage Journal

    All of you actually fell for this?

  • Does this mean Facebook is a major revenge porn site? Cause the only way Facebook can prevent revenge porn disemination is, if they are the network where it actually happens.
    So do I get this right: Facebook is a hotbed of (illegal) revenge porn sharing? And if so, why are they not suppressing that? Why is no AG suing their pants off for billions or give Zuck some much needed jailtime?

    Facebook can and does prevent any publication of a picture with a nipple in their precious "timelines" and such, so they obvi

  • Since the link to the TFA was broke can't tell.
  • What about other websites? Will Facebook share the photos with them too? I would really like to know how many photos they get. I mean serious photos, if that word can be applied to this nonsense.

    There is only one solution to revenge porn, and it's not technical. Every day recording devices are smaller and more powerful, the sharing of information easier. That trend is not going to change. So it's us that must change, adapt to new technology as we have ever done.

    We will have to just stop caring.

  • I wonder if this is the beginning of their attempt at Facebook Dating? Or Tinderbook?

  • by coolmoe2 ( 3414211 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @05:50PM (#56661962)
    Seriously this guy has won my creepiest fucker ever award.

    Even if you can upload the image to them to "fingerprint" images are often cropped and converted to other image formats and recompressd which fucks that up. So unless they have some super AI that can detect that from a 2nd generation repost this wont work.

    Just as a side note if some super porn sniffing AI can do this can I get access to it for purely scientific reasons.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Even if you can upload the image to them to "fingerprint" images are often cropped and converted to other image formats and recompressd which fucks that up. So unless they have some super AI that can detect that from a 2nd generation repost this wont work.

      Depends on the fingerprinting technique. They're not all robust to everything, of course, but things like locality sensitive hashing is somewhat robust to things like recompression or mild cropping.

  • They've GOT to be kidding.
    Someone, please, burn Facebook to the ground, and put Zuckerbergs' head on a pole on their front lawn.
  • Hacked and disseminated: Scotland's contribution of several million "up-kilt" escalator shots.

  • by avandesande ( 143899 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @06:06PM (#56662062) Journal
    Why do they want British nudes?
  • They must be in need of additional engineers.
  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @06:14PM (#56662108)

    Finally the end game of Zuckerburg's master plan emerges. As with most males, it ended up being a convoluted plan to get terribly quality nude images of women from an internet awash with professionally photographed porn.

  • Just send me all the nude photos of you and $20 year to me and I will ensure they aren't posted to the internet.

    But if you miss a payment well...

  • Next thing you know, I'm getting emails with subjects like "Add 4 more inches"
  • So I a revenge porn posted would have to do would be to open the image in MS Paint and write "slut" or something across part of the image, which they'd do anyway to prevent Facebook from detecting it immediately as nudity.

  • Quick FB users! Send me your money and I'll prevent others from stealing it from you!
  • I suggest that those of you with with Facebook accounts submit deepfake images of Mark Zuckerberg's face on that naked statue of Trump.
  • Is this just Facebook giving the finger to the GDPR? Every other website is tightening their privacy policies and taking more care over the data they collect and Facebook goes off in the opposite direction.
  • I haven't personally, but I have spent at length with people whose job includes helping the victims of "revenge porn" (or image-based abuse, as they prefer to more accurately call it), and they have generally welcomed this development. I was at the conference was this was launched in Australia, and applause went around the room.

    This is *not* intended as a general "send your nudes to Facebook and get them blocked" service. This is for a smaller group of people who have specific reason to believe that specific images are either likely to be circulated, or are already circulating in Facebook Messenger.

    For people in this situation, sometimes, having a Facebook admin look at your nude pictures, while much less than ideal, is far less of a problem than letting those pictures circulate to people like your family, friends, and employer. Doing this, or threatening to do so, is a common technique of domestic abuse.

    I agree with the critiques that it would be far, far better if you didn't have to send the image itself to Facebook to be hashed, but a) Facebook, not unreasonably, doesn't want the blocking service used for purposes other than that intended, b) the photo hashing technology is proprietary and they don't want it reverse-engineered if they can avoid it, and c) doing the hashing locally is going to create usability issues for users who are often not particularly technology-savvy.

    I wouldn't for a minute suggest that this is a perfect system. But take your male middle-class tech geek glasses of for one fucking second and try listening to the people whom this system has been put in place to help.

    • by sad_ ( 7868 )

      maybe not take any pictures (of videos) of yourself that you don't want anybody else to see.
      sounds like a much simpler plan to me.

  • by radarskiy ( 2874255 ) on Wednesday May 23, 2018 @09:12PM (#56662936)

    Facebook already has all your nude photos. They're just making you submit your own copies for identity verification.

  • I promise I wont look, really!

  • Pretty soon, people will be making fake revenge porn by putting the face of their ex-friend on the naked body of someone else. It will look good enough to embarrass the victim, and impossible to detect using Facebook's filters.

  • If this works based on a hash, how hard would it be to make some minor edits to a picture before uploading it? It seems to me a simple crop, text overlay, contrast fix, image tilt or any other change would allow a picture to pass scrutiny. Will FB send me a fail notice: "Your picture has been recognized as being prohibited by the owner, please edit it and resubmit"
  • Why can't Facebook send these users an app that runs against their nude pictures to produce the machine learning data that FB needs to identify the revenge porn without actually sending nudes to FB? Common sense, so rare...

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