Facebook wants to keep you from being a victim of revenge porn. But before it can do that, it needs you to submit nude pictures of yourself.
The social network is testing this new feature in Australia, and is asking users to upload explicit photos of themselves before anyone else gets their hands on them.
First you upload a picture of yourself to Facebook Messenger. Then, you flag the image as a "non-consensual intimate image" for Facebook.
After that something called a "hash" of the image is built, which means that Facebook creates a unique "fingerprint" for the file.
Facebook says its not storing the photos, but storing the hashes of them. If another user tries to upload the same image to Facebook or Instagram, Facebook will test it against its stored hashes and stop picture from being distributed.
Digital forensics expert Lesley Carhart told Motherboard:
"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. 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 partnering with the Australian government to roll out the new feature as a part of the country's new national reporting tool for revenge porn.