Hyderabad: Days after Cambridge Analytica shut shop following the data leak scandal, Facebook is asking people to send nudes photos to keep them safe from other people’s eyes.
As absurd as it may sound, the platform in an attempt to fight revenge porn and keep a check on the circulation of naked photographs rolled off a pilot programme, in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and United States.
“People who worry that someone might want to harm them by sharing an intimate image can proactively upload it so we can block anyone else from sharing it on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger,” said Antigone Davis, Global Head of Safety said in a post on Tuesday.
Users can share an image which they are apprehensive of being uploaded and share it with identified safety organisations in their country.
The “handful of specifically trained members of Facebook’s Community Operations Safety Team” will view this image and create digital fingerprint, which will allow Facebook to automatically delete such images.
While asking who would volunteer to share their images with Facebook, technical experts opine that with artificial intelligence (AI) where machines are continuously taught to recognise images, the face of the victim is enough to detect violations.
Balaji Viswanathan of Mitra Robots says, “It sounds a bit creepy especially at a time when Facebook is facing heat from regulators around the world. Not sure how many women would find it acceptable given that there will be a human sitting and reviewing the images before accepting it. Facebook has to convince the public more about the security of the photos while it is in the review process. How do they ensure they don't leak the pictures?”
Furthermore, he adds that Facebook is trying to implement the mechanism used in storing passwords by major websites to hash these naked images. The underlying technology itself is relatively mature as computer Vision experts have built algorithms that can tell whether two images are similar.
It may be mentioned here that, even without uploading images, people can report if their intimate images have been shared on social media without their consent.
