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Calling what Facebook has an "algorithm", while true, probably misleads here - this comment implies that the Facebook algorithm is somehow smart and does this automatically, and that Snapchat's user data would make a great training database.

My understanding is that Facebook are generating hashes from images their users choose to send them of themselves, then blocking any images that match those hashes on their network. You don't need to be a huge player to build something that works the same way really quickly - there's no smarts trying to identify the images to block here, the humans have already done so.

That Facebook system is a hard sell to me - you are choosing ahead of time to share your most intimate photos with Facebook. To implement that feature in such a way as to destroy all traces of the original file and keep only the hashes? That's a big amount of trust to place in Facebook, especially when you have no insight into how this is being performed server side.

At any rate, investing in a business like Snap primarily to get naked pictures of people strikes me as an unlikely reason. There's no shortage of such "content" out there...