Facebook is taking action against the possible circulation of child abuse images in its network through Microsoft’s PhotoDNA tool. Microsoft successfully uses this programme in its services Bing and Skydrive. After the introduction of a “digital fingerprint” last year, which serves to prevent users from uploading these pictures, Facebook now takes a further step in the fight against online child abuse.
„Many of these images recirculate on the internet time and time again, even many years after the original crime occurred and the abuser has been brought to justice,“ Ernie Allen, president and CEO of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), wrote on Microsoft’s blog. Microsoft developed the tool in 2009 and made it available to the NCMEC network. Facebook has recently joined forces with this organisation as well.
Allen adds: „And every time these crime scene images are viewed, the children in the images are re-victimized. PhotoDNA aims to break this cycle, so the images of abuse need not haunt these children online forever.“
The PhotoDNA technology scans the respective images and searches the websites for matches. It is able to find images that have been edited or resized – and therefore totally changed their „fingerprint“ or DNA. The tool has been used to examine around 2 billion images within the Microsoft services. Around 2,500 matches have been found – apparently with a reliability of 100 per cent. According to NCMEC, many of them were from the United States, Great Britain and Brazil.
But not only the Microsoft services were searched. Since 2002, the NCMEC network has examined almost 49 million images, 13 million of them in 2010. During these years, the victims have steadily become younger. Among the 3,500 children who have been identified from the most popular images circulated online, 10 per cent are infants and 67 per cent are well under 13.
