Facebook’s new pilot program aims to prevent revenge porn, but you have to share compromising pictures of yourself with the social network.
The current program: If your intimate photos are shared on Facebook without your permission, you can reach out to the company to get them taken down. Facebook will then create a mathematical fingerprint that prevents the picture from being uploaded again.
The new strategy: Now the company is saying it can make sure your naughty pictures don’t get shared without your say-so. But there’s a catch: you have to give them to Facebook. If you do, one person from a group of five reviewers will look over your images and assign each one a fingerprint.
Why it matters: This could be an important step for preventing revenge porn. But it also requires a lot of trust in a platform that has not done much to inspire confidence recently. It also serves as a reminder that human intervention is still very much required for controlling how content spreads online.
