I’m not directly suggesting that, and my suggestion would depend on the nature of the leak. For instance, in a case where an ex-boyfriend tells you “I’m going to leak the nude photos I have of you if you don’t get back together with me,” in this case the risk of sending the images you think he will leak and potentially putting them online when they weren’t online at all is not worth the risk.

However, in a case where the photos are already leaked and you found them online, the risk of NCMEC storing photos rather than hashes is a minimal risk at this point.

The reality of take it down’s system though is that none of this is factored in, and they are simply doing the most generically safe possible thing, but that is also the most materially useless thing as well.

NCMEC’s tendency on everything is to offload the real work to platforms while also ignoring the open internet. They then take credit for having a tool or doing something. Victims feel like they have done something, but they are not actually helped at all. This tool is a clear example of this.

If your image is leaked on 4chan or Statewins, for example, how would take it down get it removed?

4chan (possibly) or statewins (they never would) would need to filter all images on their site through the take it down hashlist, then remove ANYTHING that got a hit.

What happens if I submit a ton of photos that aren’t even of me into take it down? At what point in the process can NCMEC verify that these are actual NCII photos, or that they are of me? The hashes are one-way, and the hashing happens locally on my device, so they cannot.

Possible for “trusted platforms” like Meta that have close working relationships with NCMEC, Meta may have built out handling for the take it down hashlist onto their platforms, so after a hashlist hit, Facebook or Instagram may then check the photo and have to make a judgement call as to whether the photo is potential NCII or not and then whether it should be taken down or not. It is possible the tool is occasionally doing something useful on these platforms, but most of these cases are platforms which don’t allow nudity anyway, so any NCII would be filtered out with nudity detection and the hashlist is superfluous.

For any non-massive platform, like a random shady website that tends to host leaked images, how is this tool going to get your content off those sites? If the shady site owned by a guy who is intentionally doxxing and seeking out NCII, unless he is going out of his way to comply with this hashlist, it will do nothing.

The best thing you can do is to submit de-indexing requests to Google (extremely impactful to uncouple your name etc. with those images on search results), and to send takedown requests directly to webmasters of sites. Take it Down bothers me a lot because it gives victims a false sense of security while accomplishing likely nothing