Odd Enough: Here's why Facebook is asking users to upload their nudes

The social media site is raising eyebrows with its new effort to combat revenge porn.

Revenge porn is a massive, intrusive, traumatic problem that every website capable of sharing photos must reckon with.

And no site struggles with it more than Facebook, the king of the social web. But the company's solution to keeping your illicit nudes offline is raising some eyebrows, mostly because it involves, well, uploading your illicit nudes online.

On Wednesday, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation announced that Facebook was testing a new system to combat revenge porn in the land down under. The social network was asking users who worried that they would become victims of revenge porn to send the photos in question to themselves using Facebook Messenger. The company claims that once the image has been put into its system, it will be able to create a digital fingerprint of the image and stop it from appearing anywhere else on the site. The drawback, of course, is that you've just uploaded your own nude to Facebook.

Facebook's running the program in Australia in conjunction with the national government, who has a specific "e-Safety Commissioner" appointed to oversee the process. The commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, told ABC that the process is secure.

“They’re not storing the image, they’re storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies,” she told ABC. "It would be like sending yourself your image in email, but obviously this is a much safer, secure end-to-end way of sending the image without sending it through the ether."

It's worth noting that Facebook has been using versions of this system for a while. After a series of high-profile revenge porn cases, including the Marines United scandal, the company used a similar digital fingerprinting process to catch images that had been flagged as revenge porn and prevent them from being uploaded to the site again.

Still, there's a huge, huge leap of trust here. "Storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies" still means that someone or something at Facebook is going to be looking at your nudes. Even if it's just an A.I., putting your images onto Facebook's platform means the company absolutely has access to that data, despite its promises of "end-to-end encryption." If you've already shared your nudes with one party you can't trust, will giving them to Facebook's faceless A.I. really make you feel any better?

SOURCE - PULSE.NG posted by Campus94