Facebook Wants Your Nude Photos; What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
In a bid to wrap up the race for the Tin Ear of the Year Award before June 1, Facebook has begun asking its 2.2 billion users to discreetly share their indiscreet nude photos with the company. The plan, they say, is to train Facebook to block the images you don't ever want on Facebook, in cases such as revenge porn.
The company is partnering with several third-party groups – such as the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and the National Network to End Domestic Violence – to distribute review forms to those who've had to deal with former sexual partners improperly posting their sensitive images.
Requesters are given a one-time upload link to send those images to Facebook, where they are reviewed by "a handful of specially trained members" of the company's burgeoning content-review team.
Those team members will create what's effectively a digital fingerprint of the images so that Facebook's systems can automatically recognize and block the images before they can be seen by anyone outside the company. The program is undergoing trials in the United States, United Kingdom and a couple of other territories.
This all sounds pretty good. Except, remember that this is the same company that has had such a bumpy time the past couple of years controlling what's happening to personal data on its site, and what's being shared with outside companies.
You may recall that little kerfuffle last year when it became clear that as many as 80 million people had their data improperly shared/exposed to third-party providers during the 2016 elections as part of relatively routine Facebook operations.Does the expectation that people will send Facebook their nudes, specifically so that Facebook's crack team of privacy experts can examine them, strike anyone else as being even creepier that Facebook's usual level of creepy? I mean, really, just... ick.
There's also the problem that, even if it works, this will only help prevent revenge porn posts on Facebook and its subsidiaries. It won't help with revenge porn posts on, say, 4chan, or Reddit, "which previously had revenge porn subreddits and still has issues." Wouldn't it be better to get all of the major social media sites together to start an independent service that can create anonymized digital fingerprints of photos that any S.M. site can use to filter out likely revenge porn posts, and flag potential abusers?
So, yeah, it's nice that Facebook is finally trying to do something about revenge porn on its service, but timing is everything, especially for something this sensitive, and I'm finding it hard to imagine a worse time for Facebook to launch something like this. Talk about tone deaf.