(AP) — “Once you send that photo, you can’t take it back,” goes the warning to teenagers, often ignoring the reality that many teens send explicit images of themselves under duress, or without understanding the consequences.
A new online tool aims to give some control back to teens, or people who were once teens, and take down explicit images and videos of themselves from the internet.
Called Take It Down, the tool is operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and funded in part by Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram.
The site lets anyone anonymously — and without uploading any actual images — create what is essentially a digital fingerprint of the image. This fingerprint (a unique set of numbers called a “hash”) then goes into a database and the tech companies that have agreed to participate in the project remove the images from their services.
Now, the caveats. The participating platforms are, as of Monday, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Yubo, OnlyFans and Pornhub, owned by Mindgeek. If the image is on another site, or if it is sent in an encrypted platform such as WhatsApp, it will not be taken down.
