When Facebook revealed its experimental porn prevention program in Australia, it raised lots of eyebrows. After all, you will 1st need to upload your sensitive pictures if you do not need them to get posted by anybody else. Now, global Head of Safety Antigone Davis has defended the test feature during a post that also explains however it’ll work in detail. She processed that it’s “completely voluntary” and that Facebook will still remove any intimate pictures you report, hash them and prevent them from being uploaded once more. This technique is simply an “emergency option” for folks that need to proactively prevent their photos from being shared.
To participate in the trial, you will 1st need to complete an online form on Australia’s eSafety Commissioner’s official web site. you’ll then be asked to send the pictures you wish to block to yourself on messenger. The commissioner’s office can notify Facebook that you sent in a form — it will not have access to your pictures — so a “specially trained representative” from the social network will review and hash your pictures.
Whenever somebody uploads photos on Facebook, it checks them against a database of hashes, that are like digital fingerprints and are unique for every picture. Facebook and other internet titans already use the technique to fight the dissemination of {child|of kid} porn online: they keep a database of hashes from known child porn pictures in an effort to block them.
Davis assures everybody who needs to use the feature that the the company only keeps those number-and-letter hashes and not the photos themselves. Also, Facebook guarantees that when it’s done hashing your pictures, you will get a notification telling you to delete them from messenger, so Facebook can even jettison them from its servers. At the moment, only users in Australia have access to the feature, but the social network is reportedly coming up with (probably depending on user feedback) to roll it out in the us, United Kingdom and Canada in the close to future.
