Facebook has detailed a new set of safety features for India, which give users greater control over their profile pictures.
The company found that users did not share profile pictures which include their faces due to a fear of the images being publicly-accessible.
Facebook users in India will soon be able to access an optional profile picture guard, which restricts how users can interact with their profile picture.
The features of Facebook’s optional profile picture guard are:
- Other people will no longer be able to download, share or send your profile picture in a message on Facebook.
- People you’re not friends with on Facebook won’t be able to tag anyone, including themselves, in your profile picture.
- Where possible, Facebook will prevent others from taking a screenshot of your profile picture on Facebook, which is currently available only on Android devices.
- Facebook will display a blue border and shield around your profile picture as a visual cue of protection.
Based on preliminary tests, Facebook has learned that when someone adds an extra design layer to their profile picture, other people are at least 75% less likely to copy that picture.
Facebook has partnered with Jessica Singh, an illustrator who took inspiration from traditional Indian textile designs such as bandhani and kantha, to create designs for people to add to their profile picture.
Anyway, what none of these address is Facebook’s super lax moderation rules (because of their stretched ideas of freedom of speech) and the large-scale trolling that’s so common across India and other countries. It’s something that they need to urgently address, because Facebook has time and again proved it is okay with having vicious, violent, or threatening comments against women remain online. This became obvious when the Facebook training manual was leaked in May this year. And as this Conversation piece showed us, there’s enough research to show that women are often forced to retreat and stay silent in the face of encountering abuse online.
So these small Facebook suggestions to protect your photo might help a little bit. But they’re not going to go far enough.
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