In an announcement that raised plenty of eyebrows, Facebook said this week that it wants to help potential revenge porn victims keep intimate images of themselves off the social network by uploading the images via Facebook-owned Messenger. The effort, which is being rolled out in an initial test in Australia, is an extension of existing Facebook tools for identifying and removing revenge porn imagery. The goal of the new tool is to allow Facebook to create digital fingerprints of images that could be used to block photos subsequently posted for revenge porn purposes.
The company promises it isn’t storing the images, and that the goal is simply to keep vengeful people from sharing intimate imagery on Facebook “in the first place,” the company’s head of global safety, Antigone Davis, wrote in a blog post.
Unfortunately, because of issues tied to the Russians’ use of Facebook to interfere in America’s election last year, and the company’s evolving explanations for how that happened, the public’s trust in Facebook is low at the moment, and some doubt whether it is able, or even willing, to truly erase the imagery.
But advocates for domestic violence victims think the new tool is a “bold move” and say that privacy concerns might be exaggerated.
“The timing is unfortunate because of scrutiny on other issues,” says Cindy Southworth, the executive vice president and founder of the Safety Net Technology Project, and someone who’s been advising Facebook on the development of the new tool for over a year. “I think it’s getting overblown because of much bigger frustration over…
