The Facebook has collaborated with a small Australian Government agency in an effort to tackle revenge porn, in order to hash sexual or intimate images of the victims.
Ones who have shared their intimate, nude or sexual images with their someone and fear that they might release those images without their consent can now send those images to Facebook's Messenger to be “hashed”. 'Hashing' means that the images would be converted into a unique digital fingerprint which will be used to identify and block the images for being re-upload.
The agency is headed by the e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said that this would allow victims of "image-based abuse" to take action before photos were posted to Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
“We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly,” she said.
Carrie Goldberg, a New York-based lawyer, said: “We are delighted that Facebook is helping solve this problem – one faced not only by victims of actual revenge porn but also individuals with worries of imminently becoming victims.
“With its billions of users, Facebook is one place where many offenders aggress because they can maximize the harm by broadcasting the nonconsensual porn to those closest to the victim. So this is impactful.”
How the company is assuring the victims that their images will not get hacked? What if someone gets to hold on these images? What steps Facebook has taken to ensure the privacy of the victims?
The company has said that they will save these images for a very short period of time, and they will delete them to ensure it is enforcing the policy correctly.