Facebook's send-us-your-nudes service is coming to UK, America Facebook has begun conducting a pilot where it solicits intimate photographs of women – and it will soon offer the service in the United Kingdom as well as the US. Anxious exes who fear their former partner is set on revenge porn will be urged to upload photographs of themselves nude. A hash of the nude image is created and …
Is there a job going then, where these images are vetted by a human for inclusion in the barring scheme?
Might be... I wonder how many applicants they'll have. Will FB pay the vetters or will they have to pay FB for the privilege much like the old Woody Allen movie?
Icon... I'm checking my pockets for change just in case.
That's no excuse. They could easily do that check at the point they find a clash. The whole point of this nonsense is that they're supposed to be detecting when another matching image is uploaded in the clear.
Either way, you can try uploading someone else's photo and, either way, at the point they're considering removing it they'll be able to see it. The difference is that if you hash it yourself on your own machine, they can't see it if nobody uploads it in the clear.
I cannot believe that this protocol is being seriously suggested as a way of protecting people's privacy.
Doubt that would work, since you could just change one pixel and the hash would change. Meaning you could have 2,000 separate hashes for the same image.
For example, services that flag child pornography when it's uploaded use a special software (PhotoDNA) which converts the image to grayscale, then breaks it down into a grid and calculates a number per grid until they wind up with something like 1000,481,0,0,251..., meaning that modifying the image is pointless.
People would be better off getting the numerical sum of their nudes with that.
But the problem with that is, regular people aren't allowed access to that software unless they're a LEA or popular service like Facebook. (Which sucks, as I have a large anime artwork collection I'd love to sort through far more easily to remove duplicates.)
But the problem with that is, regular people aren't allowed access to that software unless they're a LEA or popular service like Facebook. (Which sucks, as I have a large anime artwork collection I'd love to sort through far more easily to remove duplicates.)
https://github.com/opennota/findimagedupes
You're welcome.
So let's get this clear. One of the world's largest marketing concerns wants everyone to upload naked pictures of themselves in order to help prevent revenge porn? What is the ratio between the number of sex pests versus the expected actual image upload?
This reeks to me of "You are all just sheep who will do exactly what we tell you to do, now shut up and upload your naked selfie"
Fortunately, no-one would want to be exposed to my back-end infrastructure.
From what little I've seen, there's no (back) end to the segmented interests of the web. There's probably armies of people who'd want to take a gander at your back passage, or mine. Now there's a thought for those supping on warm cocoa.
Out of shame rather than modesty, I won't be sharing pictures of my bits with Facebook: the list of less trustworthy organisations is about one long. Not to mention that I don't have an FB account. For those who do have an FB account, make sure Zuck uploads pics of his own nether regions first.
Oh indeed, there are people who want nothing more than pictures of your naked feet. Who don't want to see the whole breast, just cleavage in closeup.
Pron really does cater for the niche groups. Back before all this there were peeping Toms. Now there is no need.
"The solution is simple, never take photos of yourself nude and never let your "friend" take pictures of you nude."
...and women shouldn't wear ripped jeans, or walk alone after dark. Better still put them in a burka - even when having a bath. See where such apparently self-imposed restrictions lead?
There's nothing wrong with the sight of the naked human body - except in the minds of those who have been conditioned to be disturbed by their own "dark" thoughts. The blackmailers - for that is what they are - are handed their weapon by society's likely condemnation of their victim.
Whilst this might be true, it really is up to me what I want done with images of me, isn't it? And if I want to wear a burka, why not? I don't think it's a question of societal condemnation - I mean, there's lot of society that condemns wearing a burka, right? But I'm not bothered if someone posts a picture of me doing that online - revenge ultraconservatism. Right on!
Absolutely STUPID comparison.
"There's nothing wrong with the sight of the naked human body".
However if you don't want YOUR naked body online, don't give anyone a copy and don't store it in the cloud etc. You'd not parade naked on your front lawn? Or sit in the window naked?
"You'd not parade naked on your front lawn? "
It is not illegal in England & Wales jurisdictions. Any police action against a naturist is usually deemed "Public Order". You are apparently responsible if a neighbour threatens you with violence because of their own "dirty" thoughts.
The ripped jeans etc are examples where how women behave perfectly normally is deemed by some to be "asking for it". See example in Egypt recently.
I share the opinion that there's nothing innately shameful about the naked human body. Unfortunately a significant proportion of the populace think otherwise, and our legal system often tends towards the puritanical. If you have a naked picture leaked onto the internet you get to choose whether to brazen it out, or to accept the shaming that other members of society will inevitably try to fling your way - those are pretty much the only options.
Advising people not to allow naked pictures to be taken of them therefore isn't victim blaming, it's just good advice. The reality is that once there is a picture of you naked it's very easy to lose control over where that image ends up (whether that's by a "friend" leaking the image online, or a hacker exfiltrating the images). If you're OK taking that risk then go ahead - as long as you're an adult making an informed choice about it.
There isn't anything wrong with the naked human form. But I don't want pictures of my naked body circulating on the Internet, so I don't let anyone photograph me naked and I don't take any photos myself.
If other people want to make photos/films of themselves naked or having sex, that is their business, but it should be clear to them upfront, that those images might end up on the Internet. If they don't want those images plastered all over the 'Net for the rest of eternity, they should think twice before letting those photos/films be made...
Peephole cameras is something else, but you probably don't have them to upload to Faceplant in the first place. And, as others have said, hashing locally and uploading just the hash makes a lot more sense, although it will deprive the pervs at Faceplant of their jollies.
@TRT
I came to say something similar.
Until the person (male or female) has had those naked photos displayed/shown to people/uploaded without their consent, they are not a "victim" of anything.
They are a person of whom a naked photograph exists. not a victim of anything at all.
While i'm 100% against such things, the language used here is odd. You can't preemptively "be a victim". You're not a victim unless the naughty photos (which are normally taken WITH consent) are then shared minus the consent.
- Spoofed sites --> so people end up uploading there nude shots to a non-Facebook site
- Man in the middle attacks --> Pics get snaffled on the way to Facebook
- Hacks of Facebook --> Pics get grabbed at Facebook ("they dont store the pics" - my a$$ they dont! Who has ever heard of the Facebooks and Googles of the world EVER deleting ANYTHING!)
- misconfigured settings making the Pictures freely available --> Because that NEVER happens... *rolleyes*
Bugger me, this has so many Avenues for failure...
> The photo will have to be shared across across a common nude photo platform and made available to other social networks.
Are you suggested there should be a network standard for this?
The Common Naked Photo Interchange Protocol
Reminds me of the time a museum - it might have been the Kensington Science Museum itself - set up an exhibit where people could type messages into a computer and have them displayed. Very new fangled stuff in those distant days. Somebody decided to compile a list of NSFW words so the computer could spot them and blank them out on the display. Then some bright spark - who is probably a tech billionaire by now - found the file and displayed its contents for all to see.
It's not a simple filehash.
We've had TinEye - capable of taking an input image and finding cropped variations across the net - for years and years. It's developed in the meantime, but this is far from new technology.
The hashing is based (AIUI) on the variation between pixels in "key" locations (of which there are more than a few), so cropping the image won't help. Even contrast tweaks have to be fairly extreme to throw it off.
All that said, it's far from perfect.
The vast, vast majority of internet users don't read the reg. These mouth breathing, tracksuit wearing slobs access the internet almost exclusively via their credit bought iPads and iPhones and have zero clue about image editing that isn't Instagram filters. I imagine this hashing of images is amazingly effective on Facebook's platforms.
/elitism
"Whenever I upload a picture, I first crop and resize it. At that point what good is a hash of the original image?"
I searched on an image the other day on Google and it not only returned the one I gave it, but also the same photo flipped horizontally and another one that was cropped. Recognition software is getting better all of the time.
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"Or is this a lowering of standards, in correlation with the rise in stupidity, that causes nude photographs to become the norm, and now a problem ?
Regards,
Shadmeister."
Shad,
It's practically ubiquitous these days. Absolutely the norm with those of certain ages.
Hence the requirement for such a law in the first place ("revenge porn" is an actual thing you can be charged with) and hence FB thinking it needs to do something like this.
Schools have major issues with it, and beyond that age it's an overwhelming majority.
"Schools have major issues with it, and beyond that age it's an overwhelming majority."
That under-age demographic is considered criminal in the eyes of the law for taking/having such pictures - even as selfies. Pre-emptively telling Facebook they have such things seems counter-productive - especially if Facebook are then obliged to inform the police.
It used to happen, but amateur nude photography was a minority hobby, at least among those without their own darkroom.
When I was a student, one year I had a summer vacation job in the Kodak (NZ) slide mounting room. Since it was illegal to send nude pics through the post, Kodak had to pull any boxes of slides containing them and forward the box to the snapper's local cop shop for collection.
This meant that those running the slide mounting machines were expected to spot any such photos and check them in a slide projector. Cue a yell of 'Got one!' and a general stampede in the direction of the projector and screen when anything was found.
However during that summer break (6 or 8 weeks - I forget which) I only remember that happening two or three times on my shift.
> Serious question - how prevalent is the taking nude pictures of oneself, or the other half ?.
I'm pretty sure the second ever Daguerreotype was a nude, the first being a test shot for the lighting.
"I'm pretty sure the second ever Daguerreotype was a nude, the first being a test shot for the lighting."
Go back further. Clerics in the church in Italy commissioned paintings of nudes for their private apartments - usually kept behind curtain drapes. Early sculptures were nudes. It was the Christian cultures who retrospectively added figurative fig leaves to classical sculptures - or even broke off the bits that offended*** them.
***turned them on
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Thanks for the replies. Your private parts were called exactly that, because they are private.
Yes, but if people want to share them/images with selected people, they should be able to. This idea that willies or tits are somehow evil, and need to be kept hidden is f***ing Victorian, and the sort of judgemental crap-headedness that would fit right into certain bearded societies.
Nudity will please some people, and appal others. But the naked body isn't anything that should by rights HAVE to be hidden.
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*wipes away the tears of laughter* Seriously!?
I can't imagine Facebook messing that one up, they have such a brilliant track record, and of course never suddenly change their terms and conditions at all(!)
Whatever happened to NOT allowing people to snap nudes of you?
Assume person A and person B are an item and person B takes a nudie photo of person A with the consent (or otherwise) of person A. Now, if A and |B split up and person B is crass enough to want to spam the web with said photo of A, how does A upload a photo of themselves, (which exists only on B's phone) for Zuk to drool over?
And what if they have a whole portfolio of piccies?
This one ain't going to fly, is it?
> how does A upload a photo of themselves, (which exists only on B's phone) for Zuk to drool over?
And how does anyone who wishes to have a photo "hashed" prove that they are the person in the photo.
Would you have to send a copy of your passport - and hope Google doesn't hash that one by mistake.
Again, a little common sense goes a long way.
Of course in the situation you describe it doesn't help..
But in other scenarios it does, so for example if a partner sends me a picture of their bits and we later split up I cannot then upload that picture.
Given that it's fairly common to exchange nudes nowadays it's certainly useful.
FB could only use the uploaded nude as an authorization token (face-checked against existing tagged photos or some such) to block all nudes tagged with your profile name on other profiles. After the outcry, version 2 would then give you the opportunity to allow select profiles to post nudes of you again.
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I have.
It has a huge number of false matches, but does most times allow me to manually find the artist of a well known cropped painting. Amazing though how often the sites higher in ranking have wrong attribution of artist or that Google offers matches that are not remotely similar.
It can be very poor on logos, which is odd.
It's rubbish if the image isn't on many web sites.
So, the sender edits the image, and tweaks the value of one pixel off in the corner, and now the hash is completely different, which completely defeats the system. That's how hashes work. This has to be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard of. Oh, wait, maybe not the dumbest, if some guy is wanting a bunch of nudes sent to him.
Dave
Or maybe (as others are suggesting), "hash" is just sloppy shorthand for what would actually be some kind of image recognition function? I gather Google has quite a good implementation?
That said, I've never really played with image recognition myself until recently. I have been trying it out using digiKam against my home photos. Not impressed so far - it has quite a lot of false positives just when trying to recognise what constitutes a "face" (even when I turn the "accuracy" right up), and one of the first tests I gave it - some shots of a railway station taken from the bridge, please find similar photos - it failed spectacularly, completely missing even near-identical shots in the same folder.
Anybody have any hints?
M.
It's not just a hash of the file. According to the article in ahem the guardian which has significantly more information than this article, it does use Photo DNA whose ' “hash” matching technology made it possible to identify known illegal images even if someone had altered them'
At least soon facebook will have all of the 'necessary hashtags'.
So, the sender edits the image, and tweaks the value of one pixel off in the corner, and now the hash is completely different, which completely defeats the system.
To satisfy my curiosity, I succeeded in changing the hash value of an image I downloaded from a website merely by opening and then saving it with an image editor. I didn't have to modify any pixels at all.
This whole proposition seems like a bizarre social experiment dreamed up by Facebook's BOFH to determine the depth of the userbase's "Peak Stupidity".
To satisfy my curiosity, I succeeded in changing the hash value of an image I downloaded from a website merely by opening and then saving it with an image editor. I didn't have to modify any pixels at all.
That won't affect the software they're using.
If you're patient enough to try it, get the original indexed by TinEye.
Then reverse search your "modified" one. Then crop it and try again, then change some pixels and try again.
You will most likely find that TinEye correctly returns the original every time. When they say hashing, they don't mean filehashes.
Uploading another person's intimate pictures seems not unknown amongst teenagers - either out of spite or stupidity. Are all the teenagers going to pre-emptively have their own pictures hashed - just in case they "escape" though someone else?
Would that make Facebook guilty of handling such apparently under-age pictures? Would Facebook report the owner to the police? Apparently such digital selfies are still illegal - especially if transferred over a network.
This will surely only work if the person in the photos has a copy of the photos to upload to create the hashes and that the posting the 'revenge porn' does not alter images in any way.
Even sophisticated filtering software can be by passed by rotating the image through a few degrees, altering the contrast/brightness or cropping then adding a patterned border etc.
This sounds more like a PR campaign than something that is really going to stop a person determined to cause someone distress by upload images.
It's an educated guess, because I don't claim inside knowledge.
But I reach that conclusion on the basis that they're not making it freely available for home use. To be fair, it doesn't look like Microsoft have anything but honorable motives on this occasion (although I would question their own security - if the FBI comes calling are they in a position NOT to release such images?) (one of the many questions Facebook will also have to answer)
They make the software available in various cloud offerings and have donated it to a Missing Child charity amongst others. So why aren't they simply allowing us all to download a copy and do our own hashing and upload the results instead of the image - as suggested in the first post on this thread (John Robson)
I can think of only two possible explanations. First is that the process is so power hungry, you'd need a Bitcoin mining rig to run it. That doesn't look feasible from what I've read about the process. Looks like it might take about as long as creating a couple of thousand hashes. Under a second on most desktops.
The second is that they don't want it in our sticky little hands because it would relatively trivial to find ways to modify target images in such a way that they wouldn't be detected, so to preserve the value of the service, they don't want the great unwashed to access it.
In short, they're relying on "Security Through Obscurity" and, like most such attempts, that'll work for a few months, until the obscurity is cracked...
Oh, and by the way, the (partial )solution to sharing intimate private images is sharing one time keys which BOTH/ALL parties have to re-combine to access the images/data (as outlined in Digital Telepathy)
So if you happen to have access to photo(s) of you, which you believe are also in the possession of an ex/other (why would *you* have copies?), and if there are few enough of them to make this upload practical, and if Facebook doesn't set too low a limit on the uploaded quantity for any one customer, and if you trust Facebook to permanently delete the copies you send, and if you're willing to have total strangers in the form of FB employees vetting what you send (because it simply *cannot* be a fully automated process, for reasons that surely don't need to be belaboured), and if legalistics don't require FB to be able to retrieve all images anyway (think: kiddie porn), and if you trust the security and integrity of ANY internet company (cue hysterical laughter), then it's likely that if your ex does try to mischievously upload embarrassing photos to FB—they won't be able to.
Except of course, such photos probably violate FB's ToS anyway, so the miscreants will have uploaded them somewhere else where that entire fraught, unreliable and not to be trusted process wouldn't help in the slightest. Because, lest we forget, Facebook is not the internet. It's just the shallow end.¹
¹ Though not, admittedly, as shallow as Twitter, the definitive paddling pool for 'tards.
Works on partial photographs as well.
Including the ones where you Photoshopped in the excited donkey with the straw hat and earrings?
Or does that rely on the existing technology for tagging pictures already uploaded?
Cue a game of Photoshop whack-a-mole.
Going out for some popcorn. ->
Subsequent investigation found that the electronic eavesdropping was part of an engineer’s 20-percent-time project; the engineer had urged the company’s legal team to weigh in before deploying the code to the Street View fleet, but the request slipped through the cracks.
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/threatlevel_0401_streetview/
Crack...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/08/google_must_destroy_data/
Does FB have something like a Google 20-percent time project for their engineers?
I can see the headline -
Oops a daisy says Zuckerberg - one of our engineers has been a naughty boy
Isn't FB really prudish already, to the point that they've banned breastfeeding pix and the like?
If so, what would these to-be-blocked nudie pix be doing on their site? Wouldn't they just get taken down right away? What are they then achieving by this rather disturbing initiative?
Isn't FB really prudish already, to the point that they've banned breastfeeding pix and the like?
Of course. It's an American site. I'm not saying Americans don't have healthy depictions of nudity, but that the exploititive depictions swamped those almost as soon as the liberalisation* of the sixties came in.
* apologies to all US citizens offended by the use of 'liberal', but other parts of the planet have other ideas what it means.
I don't know about you but I'd really be wanting to pay very close attention to the small print in the terms and conditions before launching pictures of my ass into cyber space?
Surely it will just become an enormously exciting challenge for spotty 14 year old school boys to hack into the F*c*book naughty pictures server.
Facebook sells information about it's users that they have been more than happy to submit in various forms. FB and other companies collate that information with information they acquire from other sources. What would keep them from matching up nude photos with individuals using facial recognition/body recognition? You don't even have to have an account if some horrible person you thought of as a friend posted a picture of you and tagged it with your name. FB has a nasty habit of turning private things public without notice and even sometimes by accident. They might even "accidentally" make the nude photos available to their customers (not users, people that give them money for user information) due to a misconfigured flag or something. After noticing that bandwidth is off the hook, they might plug the leak, but the valley below will already be flooded.
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