Facebook wants your nude photos

<p>Facebook is working on a new tool to prevent the spread of revenge porn &mdash; but users may not trust the company enough to use it.</p><p>With help from the Australian government, the tech company is&nbsp;<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-02/facebook-offers-revenge-porn-solution/9112420" target="_blank">piloting a program</a>&nbsp;in some countries that would recognize intimate photos before they&#39;re shared without consent.</p><p>But it only works if worried users upload those same intimate photos to Facebook or Facebook properties first.</p><p>If you heard that as &quot;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/07/facebook-revenge-porn-nude-photos" target="_blank">Facebook is asking</a>&nbsp;users for their nude photos,&quot; you&#39;re not alone, and you&#39;re technically not wrong. But the company has offered an explanation.</p><p><b>SEE MORE: <a href="http://www.newsy.com/stories/twitter-releases-calendar-to-tackle-online-abuse/">Twitter Just Laid Out Its Schedule To Tackle Online Abuse</a></b></p><p>Facebook officials say any photos uploaded to the service will be sent securely. And the company isn&#39;t holding on to the photos themselves &mdash; it&#39;s just using its data to make a &quot;digital fingerprint&quot; that can recognize the photo and block others from posting it.</p><p>Facebook already photo-matches and blocks images reported by users, but only after they&#39;ve been uploaded to the site. The new feature is supposed to be preventative rather than reactionary.</p><p>Despite this reassurance, there&#39;s another layer to the feature users may not trust: When photos are uploaded, they&#39;ll be seen by real people &mdash;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-workers-not-an-algorithm-will-look-at-volunteered-nude-photos-first-to-stop-revenge-porn" target="_blank">Facebook workers</a>. Not algorithms or bots.</p><p>That&#39;s so Facebook employees can determine if posting those images would qualify as revenge porn, but it may make users even more squeamish about sending in their photos.</p><p>Even though plenty of people freely feed personal information to Facebook, many users say they don&#39;t really trust the site. In a poll conducted last year by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/facebook-personal-data-poll_us_571fc867e4b0b49df6a96bf3" target="_blank">HuffPost and YouGov</a>, just 3 percent of the people surveyed said they placed &quot;a lot&quot; of trust in the network.</p><p>And considering&nbsp;<a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29237469" target="_blank">past tech company breaches</a>&nbsp;involving celebrities, it seems unlikely that trust in Facebook extends to freely sharing intimate photos.</p><hr><b>Trending stories at <a href="http://www.newsy.com">Newsy.com</a></b><ul class="inline-related-links"><li><a href="http://www.newsy.com/stories/amazon-key-goes-live-amid-concerns-of-service-s-security/">Amazon Key Goes Live As The Company Tries To Convince Users It&#039;s Safe</a></li><li><a href="http://www.newsy.com/stories/ripple-effect-digital-water/">Ripple Effect: Digital Water</a></li><li><a href="http://www.newsy.com/stories/uber-to-partner-with-nasa-on-flying-car-service/">Uber&#039;s Flying Taxi Service Faces Many Hurdles, Even With NASA&#039;s Help</a></li></ul>