A questionable trial set to combat revenge porn on Facebook has been called off by The Office of the eSafety Commissioner in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica clusterfuck.
The axed plan requires users (18 years and over) who are worried of potential nude photo leaks to privately upload them to the platform themselves. If someone tries to post a duplicate of that image on Facebook, Messenger or Instagram, it’ll be recognised and stopped.
It works by creating and storing the unique digital signatures of the uploaded data and using it to identify copies of images from making it onto the platform.
While we can all agree that revenge porn needs to perish, this particular approach has officials worried that the nude photos could end up in the hands of third parties. Given this has already happened with the personal data of more than 300,000 Australian users, I would agree the concern is warranted.
“Facebook received some feedback about the proposed pilot, which we understand they are considering before going live,” a spokeswoman told The Australian. “We’ve already had some people express interest in participating in the voluntary pilot once it goes live.”
A pilot of the system will still go ahead in the US, Canada, and the UK which, if successful, could still see the feature go live here in Australia.
The tactic really comes down to the amount of trust we can put in Facebook and at the moment, there’s not much of that going around. If people are going to be uploading their own nudes in the hopes of preventing them from going public, they need to be certain that the platform is secure, which it absolutely cannot guarantee.
All eyes will be on the pilots going ahead to determine whether this is actually a viable way to tackle a serious problem.
