Facebook members using Google's Chrome browser can now send and receive secret messages embedded in Facebook photos —with an extension developed specifically for the browser.
Developer Owen Campbell-Moore said he developed the "Secretbook" extension as a research project in Oxford University.
"These messages are hidden in photos so (without great effort) they cannot be detected by Facebook, Governments or prying friends," Moore said in a blog post.
Such secret messages can be decoded by any user with the correct password and extension installed, he added.
Moore said changes to the photo are "slight enough that without access to the original it would be impossible to visually detect the message."
He said his extension uses the JPEG Steganography technique to hide and decode secret messages in photos.
But he also said the extension will not "protect" the secret messages from tools developed to detect steganography.
"(T)he advantage in this case is that 300+ million new photos are uploaded to Facebook every day so scanning them all (in addition to Facebook’s existing 250 billion photo database) would be highly computationally intensive," he said.
Moore told tech site Mashable that he and his professor, Andrew Ker, had thought hiding messages in Facebook photos was "the best way" since there are "millions of photos being shared every day across the world on Facebook, so it seemed like the ideal medium."
Mashable quoted Moore as saying more than 7,000 people have downloaded the app from his website. — TJD, GMA News
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