Funny how the concept of "good intention to go horribly wrong" came from both of us in simultaneous posts.

We can't be the only ones that think this.

Imagine that someone who is fearful of being violated in this way will be even more skeptical.

to develop a local tool that would let people hash their own images and then upload the hashes.

This is an idea that went horribly wrong somewhere along the way. This is a terrible idea and unlikely to be utilized by the people that need it the most.

The only way I see this working is to provide an offline program that does the scrambling. So then, all that Facebook gets is the digital code. No way are people going to trust them with the actual picture (nor should they.)

If you are gullible enough to send nude pics, you're probably gullible enough to send copies to FB.

but it takes someone first reporting the image and then a FB employee reviewing the report to make sure it's not just a bathing suit picture or malicious alert and then it gets taken down.

I assume they are trying to automate it by storing a baziilion gigs of pictures that they convert to an algorithm so when the software detects an image upload it can check the image against their database and reject it automatically if it's one of those nude pics that have been uploaded to them.

BUT I can't see how this is anything other than an Onion joke or some other online hoax. Like stated above - 100% chance of going horribly wrong.

Are there so many users posting legitimate nearly nudes that it is difficult to block? They have skills.

No - not through software alone
Yes
sure they do but the sheer volume of usage is incredible. Don't they have like 4 billion users?

The bottom line is they do ban nude images but this report is about a specific kind of nudes that they want people to send into them so they can block future use of. Which is a completely ridiculous plan even if it would work in theory.

A human mind easily knows if an image contains nudity. However, an image is just a collection of bits to a computer. Pattern recognition against images is a daunting task that never has 100% accuracy. Determining nudity alone requires a highly complex algorithm that doesn’t catch every nude photo because of how different photos can be.

Machine learning is a ridiculously complex subject. Even with Facebook’s current abilities, it’s still relatively easy to post anything on there.

It’s too many for a human to analyze. That’s why an algorithm needs to be used.

From Know Your Memes: 'Send Nudes' :

of everyone, so that having your nude photo on line is no longer embarrassing-everyone's is on line. Sorta like everyone in Denmark wearing a gold star of David.

It's brilliant. And if there were no humans working at FB, might even work!

Owned by Russians?, send us your nude pics comrades, we'll take good care of them......

... why don't they just take stills from all the amateur porn clips out on the PornWeb and test with them first????

Then take already distributed and reported revenge porn to test against the algorithm?

Sorry, you don't ask for human subjects in research until you're at least at gamma testing.

They want individual images of potential victims

... if they haven't already trained it to not only recognize actual nudity compared to breastfeeding and accurately assess if the image will be recognized as a nudie to be hashed in that fashion.

There's LOTS of selfie porn out there, too, on Tumblr, to test with, that's essentially public domain from anonymous sources.

This may not be a medical study, but asking for human subjects should have an ethics review on something so intimate as asking people to upload nudes and flag them as such.

They're asking for you to send in your own photos that you don't want published on the Internet by your crazy ex-boyfriend. Sort of a self inoculation.

Unless I'm mistaken. This isn't a test. They are asking potential victims to self inoculate

We live in an upsidedown world of crazy!

My first reaction.

Anthony Weiner

Better build a new server farm first.

You KNOW what would happen: The world's largest database of nude photos, filed by user name (and remember children, Facebook does not accept pen names), just sitting there waiting to be hacked into. I can just see the blackmail letters now: "Cool tattoos. Too bad your mom is Jewish and will disown any child of hers that gets one. Send us a bitcoin right now or we'll email all your nude photos to her."

They just hung a giant “HACK ME!!!!” Sign.