nudity Facebook in partnership with the Australian government, wants to stop revenge porn by sending your own nudes

[captain_to_fire]

Sources: The Guardian, Sophos

 

Quote

Facebook is asking users to send the company their nude photos in an effort to tackle revenge porn, in an attempt to give some control back to victims of this type of abuse.

 

Individuals who have shared intimate, nude or sexual images with partners and are worried that the partner (or ex-partner) might distribute them without their consent can use Messenger to send the images to be “hashed”. This means that the company converts the image into a unique digital fingerprint that can be used to identify and block any attempts to re-upload that same image.

 

Facebook is piloting the technology in Australia in partnership with a government agency headed up by the e-safety commissioner, Julia Inman Grant, who told ABCit would allow victims of “image-based abuse” to take action before pictures were posted to Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.

The fuck?! Why would Facebook needs your nudes you might ask, here's a brief explanation from security company Sophos

 

Quote

 Facebook hasn’t given much detail, but from what little has been shared it sounds like it’s planning to use hashes of our nude images, just like law enforcement uses hashes of known child abuse imagery. A hash is created by feeding a photo into a hashing function. What comes out the other end is a digital fingerprint that looks like a short jumble of letters and numbers. You can’t turn the hash back into the photo but the same photo, or identical copies of it, will always create the same hash.So, a hash of your most intimate picture is no more revealing than this:

48008908c31b9c8f8ba6bf2a4a283f29c15309b1

Since 2008, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has made available a list of hash values for known child sexual abuse images, provided by ISPs, that enables companies to check large volumes of files for matches without those companies themselves having to keep copies of offending images or to actually pry open people’s private messages.

The hash originally used to create unique file identifiers was MD5, but Microsoft at one point donated its own PhotoDNA technology to the effort. 

 

Mind you, we don’t know if that’s the technology Facebook’s planning to use. It’s announced a pilot program with four countries—the UK, the US, Australia and Canada—in which people will typically be advised to send the photos to themselves via Messenger. Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s e-safety commissioner, whose office is working with Facebook, told ABC News in Australia that sending photos via Messenger would be enough to enable Facebook to take action to prevent any re-uploads, without the photo being stored or viewed by employees.

 

Facebook says that it won’t be storing nude pictures but will use photo-matching technology to tag the images after they’re sent via its encrypted Messenger service. Then, Inman Grant said, “if somebody tried to upload that same image, which would have the same digital footprint or hash value, it will be prevented from being uploaded”. The scheme’s being trialed first in Australia and will soon be tested in Britain, the US and Canada. At present, Facebook users can report photos of themselves that have already been posted nonconsensually or maliciously. Once the images are flagged, Facebook’s in-house teams review them, using hashing to prevent them from being re-uploaded.

So basically, if you upload your nude photo to Facebook, it will pattern match what seems to be a photo of genitals and hash it so that if someone does revenge porn on you, it will be blocked. So it's kinda like Face ID but instead of a face unlocking while relying on a neural engine, it will turn photos of genitals into numbers so that if someone tries to leak your nudes, it will be blocked. So many things could go wrong with this Facebook strategy. For one, Facebook isn't known for being trustworthy when it comes to privacy and how sure are we that when someone uploads their nude photo, it will be automatically hashed and deleted after and not have some Facebook staff self-completing while hashing the picture? Secondly, how will they pattern match an initial nude photo with a leaked one given that people's bodies undergo changes all the time especially when being promiscuous? Another thing to remember is that Facebook isn't the only medium to share photos and videos. While Facebook might block it, Telegram wouldn't.

 

Which makes me think, is revenge porn among exes rampant in Australia? 

 

Then there's the point of just don't take pictures of your nudes at all. While I am not telling people how they should live their lives and I'm a firm believer that "whatever you do within the privacy of your own mind or house is up to you as long as it doesn't spill in a deleterious manner on me." But both young people and adults should realize that whatever is posted on the Internet becomes permanent especially when automatic cloud backups are enabled. But then revenge porn is a serious issue and it can be hard to determine if a relationship is going to last. So just a tip, always anticipate that a relationship might go south so don't take nude pictures and more importantly, don't take videos of intimate moments. 

 

Edited November 9, 2017 by hey_yo_
edited the title

[samcool55]

Hah! good luck! Nudes from myself don't exist

 

And the hashing is easy to bypass. Re-encode with a little bit less quality or change 1 pixel to black and tadaa, job done.
Or just basic color correction or filters or whatever bypass this as well so eh... Sounds useless and stupid.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

This is so easy to circumvent.  Change 1 pixel and you have a completely different hash.

 

EDIT : lol, Samcool beat me to it. 

[captain_to_fire]

1 minute ago, samcool55 said:

Sounds useless and stupid.

Well yes but this is the same method governments use to track down and arrest child traffickers and child porn creators which is just barbaric. But Facebook doing it, I'm not convinced that the image will be automatically deleted and not be used by their employees to self-complete.

[Sauron]

Just don't be stupid and don't send nude pictures of yourself to people. Even if you have complete trust of the receiver, the channels you'd be sending them through are often not as private as we'd like them to be, and there's always the problem of someone else getting a hold of your (or the receiver's) device or cloud password (remember the "fappening"?). Always try to put as little sensitive information on the internet as possible.

[Sauron]

8 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

And the hashing is easy to bypass. Re-encode with a little bit less quality or change 1 pixel to black and tadaa, job done.
Or just basic color correction or filters or whatever bypass this as well so eh... Sounds useless and stupid.

While this is true, there could be ways to mitigate that, like calculating hashes for different common compression levels and color filters found on common programs. Of course if the offender knows what they're doing to any extent it would be ineffective.

 

A cooler approach would be computer vision, but I wouldn't really trust a facebook bot with scanning my nudes to be able to recognize them. Then again I wouldn't take a nude picture of myself to begin with.

[samcool55]

2 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

Well yes but this is the same method governments use to track down and arrest child traffickers and child porn creators which is just barbaric. But Facebook doing it, I'm not convinced that the image will be automatically deleted and not be used by their employees to self-complete.

The technique is not that bad and it's good they fight against child porn but the idea here in general is imo quite stupid.

The issue is that they only have access to the hash and that you would be warned about it because the upload would fail.

If child porn owners are stupid enough to not modify the pictures or video's or whatever that's fine by me because that makes it easier to track them.

But in this case it just seems flawed because there's a system that reacts to you.

 

1 minute ago, Sauron said:

While this is true, there could be ways to mitigate that, like calculating hashes for different common compression levels and color filters found on common programs. Of course if the offender knows what they're doing to any extent it would be ineffective.

 

A cooler approach would be computer vision, but I wouldn't really trust a facebook bot with scanning my nudes to be able to recognize them. Then again I wouldn't take a nude picture of myself to begin with.

If they could do something like computer vision they would need an unencrypted version of the picture which would be scary AF tbh... Just the idea that facebook can scan pictures i send through messenger regardless what's on the picture wouldn't make me happy.

 

[Mooshi]

The same company that shares your data is trusted with nudes. It's a little too early for April Fool's, Stalkerbook.

[Catsrules]

 

7 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Hah! good luck! Nudes from myself don't exist

 

And the hashing is easy to bypass. Re-encode with a little bit less quality or change 1 pixel to black and tadaa, job done.
Or just basic color correction or filters or whatever bypass this as well so eh... Sounds useless and stupid.

Yep this is totally worthless. 

And even if we pretend hashing was harder to get around, it would require you to send Facebook every single nude photo you have ever taken. (or at least every photo you have sent out.)

Basically if they really want this to work Facebook would need to keep the original and do some pattern matching with the original and every photo that was uploaded.  

[samcool55]

7 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Just don't be stupid and don't send nude pictures of yourself to people. Even if you have complete trust of the receiver, the channels you'd be sending them through are often not as private as we'd like them to be, and there's always the problem of someone else getting a hold of your (or the receiver's) device or cloud password (remember the "fappening"?). Always try to put as little sensitive information on the internet as possible.

Amen.

Anyway, i have made for myself 1 simple rule. Want to see me nude? Come to me. Simple as that. If the other person doesn't want to spend time and/or money to come and see me to see me nude than sorry no sorry but you aren't going to see anything.

 

No i don't want specifically you to visit me. I don't want strangers at my door wanting to see me nekkid.

[Catsrules]

3 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Just the idea that facebook can scan pictures i send through messenger regardless what's on the picture wouldn't make me happy.

 

You do know Facebook can see everything you send and receive with FM messenger?

[captain_to_fire]

18 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Hah! good luck! Nudes from myself don't exist

 

And the hashing is easy to bypass. Re-encode with a little bit less quality or change 1 pixel to black and tadaa, job done.
Or just basic color correction or filters or whatever bypass this as well so eh... Sounds useless and stupid.

Here's a question, if a nude photo in JPG underwent hashing or basically turning it into a random string of numbers, how can the picture be reconstructed again? 

 

Does combining salting with hashing prevent reconstruction of files? I know that's how passwords are being secured nowadays by both salting and hashing.

[Sauron]

23 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Just the idea that facebook can scan pictures i send through messenger regardless what's on the picture wouldn't make me happy.

They can. As far as I know, what you send is encrypted for transfer, but on facebook's servers it isn't.

[Keg Ops]

What is this supposed to be? Are they going to send the photos as a gift to their investors?

 

 

[Sauron]

43 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

No i don't want specifically you to visit me. I don't want strangers at my door wanting to see me nekkid.

Remember, I see everything.

[samcool55]

45 minutes ago, hey_yo_ said:

Here's a question, if a nude photo in JPG underwent hashing or basically turning it into a random string of numbers, how can the picture be reconstructed again? 

 

Does combining salting with hashing prevent reconstruction of files? I know that's how passwords are being secured nowadays by both salting and hashing.

Math. To keep it simple, it's easy to calculate for example 5 x 7, it's 35. Let's say 5 is the value of the 3rd pixel and 7 is the value of the 52nd pixel (i don't know, doesn't really matter). If you then use 35 to for example divide whatever value is pixel 26 (let's say it's 15) the result is 3 and this just keeps going and going.

 

However if you see 3 you can't figure out where it came from because you don't know how it ended up being a 3. The combination of much more complicated math functions makes it impossible to reconstruct the original data from a hash.

 

The math only works in 1 direction (no pun intended) and it's mathematically impossible to reverse it.

 

[SansVarnic]

Negative Ghostrider ....

 

I seriously want to see them do this because after the first one they post Facebook will be in court for violation of privacy ... and the fall of Facebook begins. **party ensues**

[Dogsparky]

1 hour ago, samcool55 said:

Hah! good luck! Nudes from myself don't exist

 

And the hashing is easy to bypass. Re-encode with a little bit less quality or change 1 pixel to black and tadaa, job done.
Or just basic color correction or filters or whatever bypass this as well so eh... Sounds useless and stupid.

what if someone took a picture of you while you were in the bathroom without you noticing? maybe some random BS and some gnat with a camera on it 

[Ryujin2003]

Wow... I'd start sending them screens from pr0n hub...

 

Which reminds me...

 

[samcool55]

Just now, Dogsparky said:

what if someone took a picture of you while you were in the bathroom without you noticing? maybe some random BS and some gnat with a camera on it 

My bathroom doesn't have windows and i'm on the top floor, the only place high where you could take a picture of what's happening inside the living room is the tower of the army right next to the apartment. The other rooms are basically impossible to see from the outside.

[Ryujin2003]

1 minute ago, Dogsparky said:

what if someone took a picture of you while you were in the bathroom without you noticing? maybe some random BS and some gnat with a camera on it 

Your on you something. Only helps if you have the original it a copy. FB cannot take your naked body and use algorithms to determine if another nude is your nude if someone posted a picture you never had..

[Dogsparky]

1 minute ago, Ryujin2003 said:

Your on you something. Only helps if you have the original it a copy. FB cannot take your naked body and use algorithms to determine if another nude is your nude if someone posted a picture you never had..

i was making a joke that realistically couldn't be until sometime in the future, mostly got it from the flash TV show with cameras on little robotic bees that could take video and pictures or whatever, wasn't talking about algorithms,just talking about using a tiny camera on a gnat in in someones bathroom that takes a picture of said person who doesn't have nudes so there would then be nudes of that person somewhere  

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

1 hour ago, samcool55 said:

Want to see me nude? Come to me.

How far from Antwerp are you?  You don't mind if I bring my camera, right?

 

[Sauron]

17 minutes ago, Ryujin2003 said:

Your on you something. Only helps if you have the original it a copy. FB cannot take your naked body and use algorithms to determine if another nude is your nude if someone posted a picture you never had..

They could, but not with a hash.

[WMGroomAK]

1 hour ago, hey_yo_ said:

For one, Facebook isn't known for being trustworthy when it comes to privacy and how sure are we that when someone uploads their nude photo, it will be automatically hashed and deleted after and not have some Facebook staff self-completing while hashing the picture?

Well... According to the BBC article on this, it's their understanding that humans that are a part of the Community Operations Team will be looking at the images in order to make the hash of the image and then Facebook will notify you and you as a user have to delete the image...  Creepy AF in my opinion.  Fortunately, I'm fairly sure that no one would have any real interest in taking nudes of me and I sure as hell am not taking nudes of myself.

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/41928848