Would you trust Facebook with nude photographs of yourself?
What about the Australian government – would you trust them?
Would you upload these photos yourself, to Facebook, in order for them to be tagged in a way that identifies the photos as being linked to your personal Facebook account — if doing this could prevent someone else uploading these same photos of you, sometime in the future, should you be the target of a revenge porn attack?
This is the personal Facebook account that knows where you work, knows your credit card details (if you’ve ever boosted a post), that geo-tracks you, that stores your search results, that know where you are right now.
Well, they are asking you to do this.
Facebook is working with “a small Australian government agency” on a new pilot program to fight revenge porn being uploaded to their platform.
1 in 5 Aussie women aged 18-45 are victims of revenge porn.
This is obviously a deeply disturbing statistic, and a clear sign of an under-reported, widely-experienced epidemic.
Facebook’s new plan to fight the problem is gallant in attempt only, and dangerous in every other conceivable way.
Basically, they are asking you to send nude photos to yourself, via Facebook, who will then digitally mark these files.
If someone else tries to upload the same picture of you, Facebook will identify this, and catch them out. It’s placing a digital fingerprint on the files that links them to you.
Of course, you are literally sending your nude photos to Facebook, even if they insist they won’t be storing the actual photo. The risks involved, and the level of trust is a step too far.
A digital forensic expert confirmed to Motherboard that the process is faulty.
“They’re not storing a copy, but the image is still being transmitted and processed. Leaving forensic evidence in memory and potentially on disk.
“My specialty is digital forensics and I literally recover deleted images from computer systems all day—off disk and out of system memory. It’s not trivial to destroy all trace of files, including metadata and thumbnails.”
In short, those explicit photos of you will exist on Facebook’s server — vulnerable to attacks and conceivably accessible by an Australian government agency — for the foreseeable future.
Don’t do it.
