So there's this satirical publication called The Onion that makes up outrageous stories to trick people, and they published a story about Facebook planning to ask people to send them nude photos of themselves, in order to combat "revenge porn", and people left and right are falling for it, and...
wait...
What? It isn't a satirical article made up by The Onion? It's real? Facebook actually is doing that?
It's really hard to believe, but all major news networks are writing about it, including USA Today, CNBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, CNN, Fortune, and the list goes on and on and on.
Maybe they all fell for the same prank? But if they did, I can't find any evidence it's so. Usually if you make a google search for something, you'll probably quickly find if it's real or not, even if it's being parroted by major news networks. Some article or press release denouncing it as a hoax. But I can't find anything.
For all I know, this appears to be real. It really seems that Facebook is planning to ask people to send their nude photos. And apparently they are doing this in cooperation with the government agencies of some countries.
It gets creepier in that some of those articles reveal that, according to Facebook, actual human staff members will be looking at those photos. It won't solely be something like a client-side app calculating a one-way hash of the photo on the user's computer, and only sending that hash to the Facebook servers. No; the plan is to ask users to send nude photos of themselves as-is, raw, unencrypted and unhashed, and for Facebook staff members to look at those photos.
And it gets even creepier than that. Protection against the dissemination of nude photos of underage people is mentioned.
That's right, in order to protect underage people from their photos being sent through Facebook, those underage people, it seems, will be asked to send their nude photos for Facebook staff members to look.
Apparently the Facebook lawyers are ok with this plan, at least deducing from the fact that they allowed Facebook to announce the plan in public.
Have they gone absolutely insane?
If tomorrow it's announced that this is all just a big hoax, and that Facebook didn't really make any such announcement nor have ever made such plans, and that all the news organizations just fell for a massive joke, I would actually be relieved. It would restore my faith in humanity just a tiny bit.
wait...
What? It isn't a satirical article made up by The Onion? It's real? Facebook actually is doing that?
It's really hard to believe, but all major news networks are writing about it, including USA Today, CNBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, CNN, Fortune, and the list goes on and on and on.
Maybe they all fell for the same prank? But if they did, I can't find any evidence it's so. Usually if you make a google search for something, you'll probably quickly find if it's real or not, even if it's being parroted by major news networks. Some article or press release denouncing it as a hoax. But I can't find anything.
For all I know, this appears to be real. It really seems that Facebook is planning to ask people to send their nude photos. And apparently they are doing this in cooperation with the government agencies of some countries.
It gets creepier in that some of those articles reveal that, according to Facebook, actual human staff members will be looking at those photos. It won't solely be something like a client-side app calculating a one-way hash of the photo on the user's computer, and only sending that hash to the Facebook servers. No; the plan is to ask users to send nude photos of themselves as-is, raw, unencrypted and unhashed, and for Facebook staff members to look at those photos.
And it gets even creepier than that. Protection against the dissemination of nude photos of underage people is mentioned.
That's right, in order to protect underage people from their photos being sent through Facebook, those underage people, it seems, will be asked to send their nude photos for Facebook staff members to look.
Apparently the Facebook lawyers are ok with this plan, at least deducing from the fact that they allowed Facebook to announce the plan in public.
Have they gone absolutely insane?
If tomorrow it's announced that this is all just a big hoax, and that Facebook didn't really make any such announcement nor have ever made such plans, and that all the news organizations just fell for a massive joke, I would actually be relieved. It would restore my faith in humanity just a tiny bit.
It is not a joke it is a real! http://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-44223809
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