Facebook talked about the work of moderators in the department to combat pornomiest

    A few days ago it became known that Facebook in Australia launched a program for self-protection against pornomno (revenge porn). If a girl (or boyfriend) wants to pre-block her intimate photos for distribution, then she should pass them through Facebook servers. The procedure is supposedly confidential: you need to send a photo to yourself in Messenger and mark it as “pornomest”. Then the hash of the file is calculated - and it is placed in the database for blocking. The photo will be blocked for further distribution in all Facebook systems, including private chats.

    Of course, the procedure is confidential, but the commentators have made a logical conclusion that Facebook will not allow anyImages. For example, someone hashes the Facebook logo - and then block it all over the network? That is, moderation should work in such a system anyway.

    Now Facebook has officially confirmed that there is a moderation. And talked about the work of moderators .

    The news of sending your intimate photos to Facebook caused some resonance in social networks. Facebook has not officially announced the launch of the experiment (Australian media journalists accidentally found out about it during the investigation of another case). But now, when the news received such a response, I had to quickly make an official statement . "Although this is a small pilot program, we want to clearly clarify how it works," writes Facebook.

    Facebook reminds that the base of hashes of intimate photos for blocking works from April 2017 around the world. Each user can at any time tell if his intimate photos are distributed online without his permission. Studies have shown that 93% of users in this case are experiencing severe emotional stress, and 82% report a "significant deterioration in social, professional or other important aspects of life." Facebook will add a hash to the database and block the file.

    The current program in Australia is a small experiment that slightly expands the current system and allows you to proactively tag photos. It was launched in collaboration with the office of the eSafety Commissioner's Office of the Australian Government.

    The system works as follows:

    • The citizen completes the online form on the official website of the Electronic Security Commissioner.
    • To specify specific photos for blocking, a citizen is asked to send photos to himself in Messenger.
    • The e-Security Commissioner's Office informs Facebook about the need to add new intimate photos to the database (via the form). At the same time, the staff of the office itself do not have access to the photo.
    • Once a notification is received, a specially trained Community Operations team reviews and hashes the image , resulting in a machine-readable digital fingerprint (hash).
    • The Facebook database stores only the hash, but not the photos themselves. As soon as someone tries to upload a photo to the Facebook platform, it, like all other photos, is run through this database with hashes. If a match is found, the photo is blocked for sending or publishing.
    • After hashing a photo, Facebook notifies this fact of the person who reported the intimate photo by secure mail, which he provided in the office of the Electronic Security Commissioner. He is asked to remove the photo from the corresponding Messenger chat on your device. Once a photo is removed from the chat, it is deleted from the Facebook servers .

    From this description a few points are clarified. Firstly, it is now officially announced that intimate photos are actually viewed by moderators from the Community Operations department. Secondly, Facebook still keeps intimate photos on its servers for some time.

    After such an explanation, some users have even more fears: “Who looks at the pictures? What if they take a screenshot and do something with the photos themselves? ” They ask such questions .

    Information security experts also pay attention to the fact that a small modification of a photo will change its hash - and intimate photos, almost unchanged, will still be able to bypass the Facebook lock.

    Facebook is trying to reassure the public. In an interviewA motherboard representative of the company assured that moderators view blurred (blurred) photos. It's hard to believe that Facebook actually implemented such a system; rather, it sounds like a clumsy attempt to get out of the situation. At least, at the request to clarify at what stage the blurring of the photos takes place, the representative of Facebook mumbled something about hashing and referred to an article in which not a word about the blurring.

    Despite all these assurances, for some reason, the words of Mark Zuckerberg from the chat in 2004 , at the dawn of Facebook, come to mind :

    Zuk: Yes, so if you ever need info about someone at Harvard
    Zuk: Contact
    Zuk: I have 4000 email addresses, photos, addresses, social security numbers
    [Friend's name has been edited]: What? And how did you get them?
    Zuk: People contribute by themselves.
    Zuk: I don't know why.
    Zuk: They "believe me"
    Zuk: Dumb assholes

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