Facebook’s chutzpah

Intimate image collection is just another signal

Facebook wants you to upload nude pictures of yourself to the company’s Messenger service — for your safety.

This is the company’s newly announced plan to combat the spread of “revenge porn” — sexually explicit images of a person distributed without consent. The idea is to create a “digital fingerprint” of your naked photos using artificial intelligence, which the system can then use to automatically block anyone from uploading the same image to the site at a later date.

Is Facebook still staffed by humans, or has that artificial intelligence finally made them all redundant? A human would know that this plan is invasive and absurd.

Let’s go chronologically through some of the reasons not to trust Facebook with nude photos. In 2012, Facebook forced a new email address on users, which ended up altering thousands of address books on phones and devices and rerouting emails to Facebook. That same year, Facebook experimented on its users’ mental health by tampering with their newsfeeds — unbeknownst to the 689,000 selected for the study — and measuring how the changes affected their subsequent posts. In 2015, the National Network to End Domestic Violence released a report showing that Facebook is the most misused social media platform by abusers, yet the company refused and still refuses to let users post under anything but their real names.

Two months ago, a Spanish court found Facebook guilty of breaking privacy rules on multiple counts over the way it uses people’s personal data for advertising purposes. And just in the past month, Facebook said Russian propaganda advertising had reached only 10 million people through the platform but was later forced to admit the true figure was approximately 150 million.

Facebook is in the business of data collection — your data. When you sign up for the service, you give it the right to almost all of your personal data, not only for more relevant advertising but also “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” Those last two words mean they can do pretty much whatever they want with your data — a category that would include your naked photos under the new plan.

No one trusts Facebook, and no one should.