In addition, the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children also has a program underway with various law enforcement agencies known as “Project Vic”, which uses PhotoDNA to help law enforcement automatically sift through the massive number of images in their child sexual exploitation investigations to ID new criminals.
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In 2012, Microsoft also began partnering with others, including law enforcement, to integrate PhotoDNA into tools used in child abuse investigations like Netclean Analyze, software often used by Swedish law enforcement agencies. When Microsoft finds an image signature match, it reports it to NCMEC in the U.S., or, in the U.K., those reports go to CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre). And in 2009, Microsoft also donated PhotoDNA to NCMEC to aid in the fight against child exploitation. The technology itself grew out of a partnership between Microsoft, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Dartmouth College. Microsoft today uses the technology on Bing, and its cloud storage service to identify child abuse images and stop them from being redistributed online. That unique signature can then be used in comparison with other images online. Combined, those numerical values represent the “PhotoDNA signature” of an image file. The technology then divides the image into squares and assigns a numerical value that represents the unique shading found within each square. PhotoDNA converts an image into a common black-and-white format and size the image to a uniform size, Microsoft explained last year while announcing its increased efforts at collaborating with Google to combat online child abuse. (That’s an awful and psychologically draining job, after all.) Microsoft’s “PhotoDNA” technology is all about making it so that these specific types of illegal images can be automatically identified by computer programs, not people. PhotoDNA Automates Child Abuse Image Detection In fact, one of the technologies used to identify and help stamp out the sharing of these illegal images online was originally developed by Microsoft. This case, and the technology that allowed for the arrest, is only focused on child pornography identification.Ĭhild porn is a problem major internet companies, including both Microsoft and Google, have been tackling for years. Nor does Google actively or passively (through automated means) scan users’ email accounts for other types of criminal activity, like planning a robbery, for example. Similarly, Google engineers were not reading through this man’s email account in order to spot the illegal images being shared.
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Today, Gmail customers generally know that Google uses a type of automated technology that scans your email for keywords and phrases in order to display relevant advertising to support the free service, and that no human ever actively reads your personal email. Those questions, however, seem to misunderstand the technology Google used to help make this arrest. Was Google actively scanning Gmail for illegal activity? Was Google overstepping its role as a service provider by tipping off authorities about the data hosted in a user’s Gmail account? – or so asked security firm Sophos shortly following the incident. But the nature of how the discovery came about led some to questions about the methodologies used behind the scenes. No one will argue against the outcome of a case which saw a man arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect’s Gmail account.