Facebook is testing a new tool to fight revenge porn in Australia, but there is a rather awkward catch: Facebook needs you to send the platform your nudes first.
According to the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC), Facebook is asking users who are worried about their photos being exposed on Instagram or Facebook to contact the e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, and to send their own nudes to themselves on Facebook Messenger.
“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,” said Grant.
When you upload the photo to yourself via Messenger, you would flag it as “non-consensual intimate image” for Facebook, and the company will then use technology to create a “fingerprint” of the image. If someone else tries to upload the same image, it will be scanned against the stored fingerprints or “hashes” and will then be prevented from being uploaded. Grant said Facebook is not storing the image, just the hash.
As Motherboard points out, though, this still putting a lot of faith in Facebook—and hackers to not figure out a way around this.
“Yes, they’re not storing a copy, but the image is still being transmitted and processed, leaving forensic evidence in memory and potentially on disk,” digital forensics expert Lesley Carhart told Motherboard.
Facebook released a revenge-porn reporting feature in April that also uses photo-matching technology to prevent flagged non-consensual images from spreading. This was shortly after the Marines United scandal broke, in which a 30,000-member strong Facebook group was found sharing and leaking nude photos of fellow service members.
According to Motherboard, Facebook is looking into additional countries, outside of Australia, to bring the new feature.