Facebook Can Detect Nudes And Revenge Porn But Won't Tell You

Nudes can be an extremely powerful ‘tool’ and weapon for harassment and revenge. Cases where nudes or ‘revenge porn’ of ex-lovers are posted online for the perpetrator to ‘get back’ at their estranged sweethearts aren’t new. Facebook recently claimed that they have a system in place that’s capable of detecting when someone posts such materials on the social platform.

But the amazing thing is that the victim of the harassment attempt would have no idea that it happened. No notification about the attempt will be sent out by Facebook. That’s a surprising level of secrecy surrounding a mechanism that’s meant to stop crimes from taking place, especially when such attempts could then be tried elsewhere.

According to a report published by news outlets, the system that Facebook uses will create what’s known as ‘digital fingerprints’ of lewd, inappropriate contents already vetted by Facebook’s security experts. By matching the ‘fingerprints’ of uploads and the explicit ones, the system would block the uploads.

It is understandable that Facebook didn’t tell users that a crime targeting them was committed on the platform since disclosing such information straight-forwardly to the victim can cause shocks and mental traumas. However, the policy of Facebook of not telling anyone at all about the attempts are indeed puzzling.

The company has the evidences and the identities of those who did it, keeping a tight lip is a bad move since it could prevent people from taking action to stop further harassment. Therefore, quite a lot of experts are advocating for an optional push notification sent to users to inform them about an upload involving revenge porn.

Though there are still a lot of discussions about the ‘digital fingerprint’ business, nothing can be said as an excuse for Facebook to keeping victims of such crimes in the dark.