Meta-owned Instagram, on Thursday, said it is testing a new feature to eliminate sextortion and intimate image abuse for its teen users, which will make it more difficult for potential scammers as well as criminals to find and interact with teens.
Sextortion is a form of sexual exploitation meaning that someone threatens to distribute private and sensitive material if the victim doesn’t provide them images of a sexual nature, sexual favours, or money, based on a statement of an FBI agent.
The novel feature of nudity protection looks to blur images detected as containing nudity and encourages people to think twice before sending nude images. Nudity protection, the tech company said, will be turned on by default for teens under 18 globally.
Instagram said this feature is designed to protect people from seeing unwanted nudity in their DMs (direct messages), while also protecting them from scammers who may send nude images to trick people into sending their images in return.
The app most popular for its reel feature also said it is testing new measures to support young people to recognise and protect themselves from such scams.
The tech giant emphasized nudity protection will use on-device machine learning to analyze images sent in a DM on Instagram containing nudity which will automatically start working in end-to-end encrypted chats, where Meta won’t have access to these images unless someone chooses to report them to us.
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