New software from Microsoft to fight child porn
Around 1.8 billion images uploaded each day, around 720,000 depict child pornography
The National Center of Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has been facing serious issues with the growing menace of child pornography. Coming to the rescue here is Microsoft’s latest intelligent software, which promises to make a difference and help curb child pornography on the internet.
Imagine you’re a doctor struggling to figure out what’s ailing your patient, but you don’t have medical equipment, a lab or any of today’s modern diagnostic tests. Yet somehow, you must identify the problem among the nearly infinite possibilities and treat it before it does more damage.
Similarly, for social media and photo sharing companies, trying to stop the spread of online child sexual abuse photos is just as daunting until they have the right tools. About 720,000 of these illegal images are among the 1.8 billion pictures uploaded across the Internet each day, making it incredibly complicated for service providers to find and remove them — until now.
Microsoft has just launched a new product that will help combat the spread of child pornography. PhotoDNA, a free service from Microsoft, helps detect and remove images that could possibly depict the sexual abuse towards children. Though the PhotoDNA service has been around for a few years now, Microsoft had been facing issues with technical expertise and funds to keep it running. The new cloud service from Microsoft now makes it easier for smaller companies to use the technology and in turn also help develop the product further. This will also allow more companies to join in and fight against child pornography.
Microsoft stated that around 1.8 billion images are uploaded each day and around 720,000 images are images that depict child pornography. Monitoring a huge amount of photos each day is almost impossible and products such as PhotoDNA, and Google’s child porn detector becomes an absolute necessity.
PhotoDNA works intelligently, but with a lot of complexity. It converts every photo/image passing through the software into numerical values. These values are a hash or a digital signature for the image. This makes it possible for the software to detect any photo which has been even slightly altered to bypass detection. The technology allows companies to compare millions of photos against a hash set of child sexual abuse images. The hash set is created by NCMEC and derived from the “worst of the worst” child pornography images uploaded to the CyberTipline by electronic service providers.
Twitter and Facebook have also been using similar products for years, but now smaller companies will also be able to empower their websites. Flipboard and Kik are also currently using PhotoDNA. “The Flipboard community is built on the desire to inspire each other with the things we love. Our community needs to trust that we do everything possible to stop the spread of illegal content, especially images of child sexual abuse,” says David Creemer, Flipboard’s head of Platform Engineering. “Manually searching for a handful of illegal images among the millions uploaded and curated every day is simply an impossible task, so we looked for a solution and found it in Microsoft’s PhotoDNA. Together we built an effective service that scales and works great.”
For NCMEC, PhotoDNA is a ‘proactive way to make the Internet safer’ while helping victims heal at the same time.