Facebook has started rolling out two new features in India, its second-largest market, that will help prevent copying or downloading users’ profile pictures from the social networking site.
The India-first product seeks to prevent misuse of pictures as well as address the risks related to identity theft.
“In our research with people and safety organisations in India, we heard that there is a discomfort, particularly for women, in putting a picture of your face as a profile photo because they’re concerned about what may happen to their photos,” Aarati Soman, product manager at Facebook told The Hindu .
She added that the two new features — profile picture guard and profile picture design — will give people in India more control over who can download and share their profile photo.
The profile picture guard, when applied, will display a blue border and shield around the profile picture. People will not be able to “download and share the profile picture. They won’t be able to send it as a message. They won’t be able to share it on an external platform. They won’t be able to right click or long press… we take away those functionalities,” Ms. Soman explained.
In addition, with the new feature, someone will not be able to take a screen shot of the profile picture. This is currently available in the latest version of the application on Android devices.
“In this way, we are hoping to give people a lot more control over their profile photo so that they feel comfortable uploading a photo of themselves or whatever picture they want so that they go on to make friendships on Facebook and the type of meaningful communities that they desire,” Ms. Soman explained.
She pointed out that while profile picture guard takes away all the obvious ways to copy a picture “there are other ways of copying a photo, for instance, someone could take a photo of a photo using two different phones.” So, Facebook added profile picture design that has a design overlay on the profile picture. This Facebook found in its research deters copying of a profile picture by 75%.
Ankhi Das, public policy director, Facebook India South & Central Asia said in an interview that the focus was on prevention of misuse as incidents of unauthorised use and impersonation “were bubbling up”.
The roll-out will be completed by June 27 and Facebook will be educating users about the feature using the news feed. The company will study the response to the tools in India before taking them to other markets or extending the feature to applications such as WhatsApp and Instagram.
