Facebook needs your nude photos — to protect you

Would you voluntarily send Facebook nude photos of yourself ? 4

The company is insisting it needs them — for your own protection.

Let’s say you have a spiteful ex who decides to embarrass you by posting a nude photo made in private. Facebook says if you send the photo to the company first, it will make sure it never shows up on its site.

But can you trust Facebook? The company says it won’t store the photos but instead create a digital footprint so that its image-matching technology can prevent any future uploading of a copy of the photograph. The one caveat is the original image file needs to be uploaded, the Verge reported.

That’s where the system can backfire, according to digital forensics expert Lesley Carhart.

“Yes, they’re not storing a copy, but the image is still being transmitted and processed. Leaving forensic evidence in memory and potentially on disk,” Carhart told Motherboard. “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.”

Facebook is piloting the program in Australia with the country’s Office of the eSafety Commissioner, an agency dedicated to online safety. Next, it’ll be tested in the United States, Britain and Canada, the Times of London reported.

“It would be like sending yourself your image in email, but obviously this is a much safer, secure end-to-end way of sending the image without sending it through the ether,” Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Inman Grant, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Carrie Goldberg, a New Yorkbased lawyer who specializes in sexual privacy, told the Guardian she is “delighted” with the initiative and thinks it can help fight revenge porn.