A group of local women who have given advice to Facebook, butted heads with Google and have helped thousands of victims of image abuse – more commonly known as revenge porn – are celebrating the first anniversary of their organization. Battling Against Demeaning and Abusive Selfie Sharing – BADASS – began a year ago after founder Katelyn Bowden of Youngstown discovered intimate images of her had been posted to the internet without her consent after an ex-boyfriend’s phone was stolen. With little protection in terms of state legislation, the police couldn’t offer Bowden much help. Frustrated, she and BeLinda Berry, a friend whose images also were stolen and shared on the internet, began the nonprofit BADASS to help victims of image abuse fight back. By their first year, the group was responsible for having more than 9,000 images removed from the internet and identified more than 1,500 people who…
antirevenge
Facebook is expanding its controversial anti-revenge porn program to the US, UK, and Canada — Quartz
Last November, Australian media reported that Facebook was experimenting with a novel idea to combat revenge porn on its platforms. In a pilot program done in cooperation with the government, users would do something that feels ill advised: upload a nude image to Facebook. The idea was that by doing so, Facebook could preempt that specific image from being uploaded to the platform by someone else in the future through technology that can help identify duplicates. The program sparked backlash among Facebook observers and internet users. One cybersecurity expert told Quartz at the time that it was a “horrible idea,” questioning the wisdom of giving such sensitive information to a third party—a sentiment hard to shake after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed just how unsafe user data was on Facebook. Despite the criticism, on May 22, Facebook announced that it was expanding the tests to the US, UK,…
The office of the Australian e-safety commissioner has confirmed that a planned pilot that would allow Facebook users to upload their nudes to the social media website to assist with the takedown of those nude photos from Facebook, will likely launch later this year. Late last year the e-safety commissioner announced the pilot where users fill out a form with the commissioner, send the photo via a one-time link provided to them, a Facebook employee reviews the image, hashes it (stores it in a “human-unreadable numerical fingerprint”) and then deletes the original photo. When someone attempts to upload the photo to Facebook after that, it is matched with the hash and blocked. This week Facebook announced it would expand the pilot to the UK, Canada, and the US. The Australian newspaper then reported on Friday that the pilot was “called off” in Australia by the e-safety commissioner “amid fears…