The important reason why Facebook is asking for your nude pictures.

In a radical bid to stop revenge porn, Facebook is asking for your nudes.

It’s a new strategy being tested in Australia by Facebook and the government agency e-Safety to stop people publicly sharing intimate images of others without their consent.

It might be a former lover, sharing sexually explicit material. It might be a hacker, who’s stumbled across something private. Whoever it is, the effects can be devastating.

Now, Facebook is asking potential victims to send sexually explicit images to themselves through Facebook messenger.

This allows Facebook administrators to “hash” the image – or create a unique digital footprint identifying the image and blocking any attempts from any user to upload the same photograph.

“They’re not storing the image, they’re storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies,” e-Safety commissioner Julia Inman Grant told the ABC.

“So if somebody tried to upload that same image, which would have the same digital footprint or hash value, it will be prevented from being uploaded.”

Don’t be naive about nude selfies. Post contines below.

In 2015, Facebook officially defined and banned revenge porn, after a hacker exposed intimate photographs of female celebrities and sent the images viral.

Jennifer Lawrence, whose photos were shared in the scandal, described the act as a “sex crime”.

According to Inman Grant, one-in-five Australian women aged 18-45 are victims of the same “sex crime”.

“We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly,” Inman Grant said.

The problem is: banning it isn’t the same as stopping it. And – other than telling women ‘don’t send nudes in the first place’ – social media platforms and parents alike have been at a loss at how to prevent the act.

Hopefully, this is about to change.

“[Facebook] thought of many different ways to do this. They came to the conclusion, as one of the major technology companies in the world, that this was the safest way for users to share the digital footprints,” Inman Grant said.

“We want to empower people to be able to protect themselves and take action, we don’t want to make them vulnerable.”