Adults who have shared nude or sexually explicit photos with someone online and are worried about unauthorised distribution can now report these images to the Australian government’s eSafety Commission. This serves as a pre-emptive strike against revenge porn, a common method of abuse and exploitation online.
This is part of Facebook’s effort to combat “revenge porn” in Australia by encouraging users to submit their nude photos to a pilot project designed to prevent intimate images from being shared without their consent.
According to Guardian, Users can then securely send the photos to themselves via Messenger, a process that allows Facebook to “hash” them, creating a unique digital fingerprint.This unique digital fingerprint is then used to block any further distribution of the image on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.
According to Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global safety, “We’re using image-matching technology to prevent non-consensual intimate images from being shared.” According to him, Britain, Canada and the United States are also expected to take part in the project.
“It removes control and power from the perpetrator who is ostensibly trying to amplify the humiliation of the victim amongst friends, family and colleagues,” eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant told AFP. Inman Grant said that if successful, the Facebook trial should be extended to other online platforms.
A recent survey by the commission showed one in five women in Australia aged 18-45 suffered image-based abuse, with Facebook and its Messenger app accounting for 53 percent of revenge porn, followed by Snapchat at 11 percent then Instagram at four percent.
Its eSafety Commission launched an online portal last month, allowing victims to report cases where their photos have been shared on the internet without consent. The commission then works with websites and search engines to have them removed.
The rising incidence of revenge porn has awakened the consciousness of the internet world to the challenge. And, women are overwhelmingly the victims of revenge porn. Of the 139 cases reported in the UK between January and April 2015, 80 percent involved images of women. Recall the internet-breaking Rob Kardashian and Blac Chyna relationship saga and the avalanche of nudes that Rob shared in the middle of the heat. Sia’s predicament is more recent.
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Ann Olivarius, a senior partner at McAllister Olivarius, has described how porn revenge should be approached: “The digital world is not separate – it is the real world, where people express opinions and have important social existences. It’s not something we can fully opt out of, or should be asked to. We need to treat online abuse as real, as an extension of existing patterns of abusive behaviour.”
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