Facebook want you to send in naked photos

FACEBOOK is asking British users to send in any naked photos of themselves they fear could be used as revenge porn by jilted lovers.

Anyone who suspects an intimate image could be posted maliciously on the social network will be able to take action to prevent it going public.

A new system allows them to submit a photo they fear has fallen into the wrong hands to a special team at Facebook. They will give the photo a unique digital fingerprint that will allow a copy of the image to be recognised and blocked if anyone else tries to post it on Facebook – or Instagram and Messenger, which it owns.

Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, told the BBC that photos will be seen by ‘about five specially trained reviewers’.

But sharing nude photos with Facebook is likely to be a leap of faith for many people, following the data privacy scandal which saw information about millions of users being improperly shared.

In a statement posted on Facebook yesterday, Miss Davis said: ‘ It’s demeaning and devastating when someone’s intimate images are shared without their permission, and we want to do everything we can to help victims of this abuse.

‘People who worry that someone might want to harm them by sharing an intimate image can proactively upload it so we can block anyone else from sharing it.’

Anyone wishing to get a photo blocked can contact the Revenge Porn Helpline or submit an online form to Facebook. The company will email them a secure, one-time upload link to submit their nude photo.

Miss Davis said: ‘One of a handful of specifically trained members of our community operations safety team will review the report and create a unique fingerprint, or hash, that allows us to identify future uploads of the images without keeping copies of them on our servers.

‘Once we create these hashes, we delete the images from our servers – no later than seven days.

‘We store the hashes so any time someone tries to upload an image with the same fingerprint, we can block it from appearing.’

The system will only work if the potential victim possesses a copy of the photo they are concerned about.