Facebook debuts new tools to keep your profile photos from being stolen

In an effort to put an end to catfishing and other abuses of stolen profile photos, Facebook has introduced a new photo guard and photo designs to deter misuse.

In an effort to curb the theft and misuse of its users' profile photos, Facebook has introduced new image controls and tools to give people more control over their images. The program, announced in a press release on Wednesday, will initially roll out in a pilot program to users in India.

According to the release, Facebook has been working on the features for roughly a year or so. And the firm has specifically targeted the Indian market based on feedback from users.

"In our research with people and safety organizations in India, we've heard that some women choose not to share profile pictures that include their faces anywhere on the internet because they're concerned about what may happen to their photos," the release said.

The core functionality is a new set of tools that offer more granular control over how other users can interact with your photo. If certain features are enacted, other internet users won't be able to download or share your profile photo, or send it in a message, the release said.

If you aren't friends with someone on Facebook, they will not be able to tag anyone in your profile picture with the new controls either, the release said. The firm is also working on ways to prevent other users from screenshotting your profile image as well, the release said. If the new tools are in use on a given photo, it will have a blue border and shield around it.

According to the release, Facebook is also adding a new design layer that can be added to profile pictures. Based on testing the firm has conducted, the use of such a design could make others 75% less likely to copy that picture.

The new tools will help individual users fight against online behavior like catfishing, but it could also help businesses and brands better protect copyrighted images they are using in their profile.

The 3 big takeaways for TechRepublic readers

1. A new set of tools from Facebook aims to make it easier for users to protect their profile image and control how it is accessed.
2. Other users won't be able to download or share your image, or send it in a message. Non-Facebook friends won't be able to tag anyone in your profile picture either.
3. A new design layer that can be added to photos will also deter users from trying to copy that photo.

At Home With Mark Zuckerberg And Jarvis,

When new engineers join Facebook–no matter whether they’re just out of college or VP-level veterans–they spend their first six weeks in Bootcamp, an intensive program designed to help them learn the ins and outs of the company’s massive code base and the always-evolving set of programming tools at their disposal.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s original engineer, contributed more to that code than anyone else in the early years of its existence. But the 32-year-old CEO never went through the Bootcamp program, which was launched in 2006, two years after he founded the company in his Harvard dorm room.

Last January, Zuckerberg announced that he planned to build an AI system to run his home using Facebook tools, in the latest of the personal-growth challenges he gives himself each year. An exciting exploration of the state of the art of AI–a technology field essential to Facebook’s future–the project also forced him to refresh his command of the company’s programming tools and processes. That in turn has reconnected him to the daily experience of the thousands of engineers he manages and the engineering culture that’s at the heart of one of the world’s most important technology companies.

But being CEO of Facebook is not the kind of job you can abandon for six weeks in the interest of continuing education. “I didn’t go through a formal Bootcamp,” Zuckerberg told me last week in the spacious living room of his classic 113-year-old wood-frame Palo Alto, California, home, where I’ve come for a Jarvis demo and the first interview he has given about this year’s personal-challenge project. “But when I ask people questions, you can imagine that they respond pretty quickly.”

Mark Zuckerberg turns the lights off with Jarvis, his personal AI system.

Zuckerberg has always enjoyed what he calls the “deterministic” nature of engineering–the element of being able to sit down and build something that does exactly what you want it to do. For all the wildly ambitious things he can accomplish as the head of a company of more than 15,000 people that has billions of users across Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook itself, he missed that pleasurable certainty.

That’s why he has continued to work on small programming projects in his rare spare time, and why his personal challenge back in 2012 was to code every day. He has participated in several company hackathons over the years and, as an exercise, once wrote a system that paired Facebook’s org chart and the internal social graph to see which groups within the company were most socially connected.

Often, Zuckerberg told me, he emerges from a coding session feeling much like he does when he studies Mandarin, the language he learned as his 2010 challenge. He feels like his brain is activated, on fire.

Facebook’s engineering culture, though, mandates that if your work breaks, you have to stop what you’re doing and fix it. That’s just not practical for the hyper-busy, globetrotting CEO. “I’m either going to get pulled out of meetings, or someone is going to have to fix my code, which is kind of a big no-no,” he says. So it’s been quite some time since he actually checked in any code at work.

Over the last year, though, Zuckerberg has spent between 100 and 150 hours on his home project. Though it’s named for Tony Stark’s futuristic Jarvis AI in the Iron Man movies, it’s more akin to a homemade, highly personal version of something like Amazon’s Alexa service, letting him and his wife Priscilla Chan use a custom iPhone app or a Facebook Messenger bot to turn lights on and off, play music based on personal tastes, open the front gate for friends, make toast, and even wake up their one-year-old daughter Max with Mandarin lessons.

Morgan Freeman is the voice of Jarvis.

Facebook’s new disaster maps aim to improve how organizations respond to crises

Facebook’s new disaster maps aim to improve how organizations respond to crises

Image via Facebook

Facebook is working with three organizations — UNICEF, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and the World Food Programme — on a new maps initiative that aims to improve how communities are helped after disasters.

Called disaster maps, the resource uses “aggregated, de-identified” Facebook data to provide key information organizations said would be most helpful in improving how they respond and provide relief in the immediate hours after a crisis.

Three types of maps are available. Location-density maps show where people are physically located before, during, and after a crisis, and are compared to historical records (like population estimates). Movement maps show patterns of movement over a period of hours so organizations can better predict where to direct resources. Finally, Safety Check maps display where people check in safely following a disaster, showing where help may be needed.

This data could crucially change the way relief is provided in the immediate aftermath of a crisis. Dale Kunce, global lead for information communication technology and analytics for the American Red Cross, tells VOA News that after a disaster, “We might know where the house is, but we don't know where the people are. Our first reaction may be to go to where the devastation happened, but maybe most people are 10 miles away, staying with families when they reported they were safe. So the place to go may be where they are.”

In the past, disaster response professionals relied on Facebook Live and other video tools to gather immediate information to help inform how and where to allocate resources. On the user side, Facebook currently offers Community Help in conjunction with Safety Check, a feature that lets users find or offer food, shelter, transportation, and other forms of aid.

The company intends to roll out disaster maps for use by governments and additional organizations in the future, promising that “all applications will be reviewed carefully by people at Facebook, including those with local expertise.”

It’s clear that Facebook has a wealth of data on users who agree to use the service, and while the announcement of sharing more user information can raise hackles for some, for now we have to take its word that the data is being shared as stated, and will help those at their most vulnerable.