Redmond, Washington — While much of the social media world is still bustling about LinkedIn’s IPO, but the popular social media Facebook and Microsoft on Friday formally unveiled an alliance to unearth child porn at the world’s leading online social network, in an attempt to drive pedophiles away from its service, Redmond announced in a blog post yesterday.
Facebook is about to begin clamp down hardcore on child pornography shared through or stored on its site. Only photos of prepubescent children (under the age of 12) will be targeted.
The world’s largest social media networking site and Microsoft have disclosed that they will be forging alliance with he National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) PhotoDNA program to combat child pornography.
(Credit: Microsoft Research, PhotoDNA)
The program especially depends upon a technology developed by Microsoft Research and Dartmouth College computer science professor, Hany Farid in 2009, called PhotoDNA that employs image-matching technology to find known depictions of child pornography across the Web. Microsoft later donated the technology to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to stop the online distribution of child rape and pornography images.
“This application dubbed as PhotoDNA now being employed by Facebook is a typical for any web site that uses images, either to track down attackers that have already been recognized or just merely so people can find pictures of folks that they want to find online,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at The Enderle Group.
Microsoft has been utilizing PhotoDNA with positive outcome since the service’s evolution. PhotoDNA, a system devised by Microsoft, will mean Facebook will not have to rely on complaints to police the billions of images uploaded by its more than 500 million users.
According to the company, it has investigated more than 2 billion images via its Bing image search and SkyDrive. To date, it has discovered 1,500 matches and 1,000 matches on Bing and SkyDrive, respectively. Presently, the system is operated by the (NCMEC), based in Virginia. The organization noted that it has collected 10,000 images of child abuse from law enforcement authorities to serve as the basis of PhotoDNA, and has millions more on file.
“Many of these images recirculate on the Internet over and over 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 wrote on Microsoft’s blog. “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.”
NCMEC has a Congressional directive to function as a clearinghouse for the sensitive and unlawful material to help identify victims and assist law enforcement with investigations, the Times reported.
Bill Harmon, a lawyer in Microsoft’s digital crimes unit, explained that PhotoDNA unmasks child pornography with “zero false positives”.
“Some images become ‘popular’ and are used time and time again — making good targets for the PhotoDNA program,” he said in a post on the Microsoft blog.
“We think this is a game changer and we are excited to be a part of this partnership,” Facebook assistant general counsel Chris Sonderby said in broadcast streamed at the social network.
Moving forward, PhotoDNA will begin screening through hundreds of millions photos uploaded daily to Facebook, thwarting pictures recognized as child porn and, hopefully, leading police to the sources, according to Sonderby.
If accumulation of such imagery are seized, new pictures will be “fingerprinted” and made part of the PhotoDNA net, said Allen.
“This is a nuisance that is global in nature,” Allen said. “We think with Facebook we will be able to identify perpetrators preying on kids all over the world.”
The California-based social media service is reported to have more than 600 million members around the planet. Facebook was heavily condemned in Britain last year over its child protection efforts by CEOP, the police agency responsible for tracking down pedophiles online.
“Despite NCMEC is a US-based organization, we discovered that image matches on our services are stemming from abuse that has occurred across many countries, including the US, UK and Brazil among others,” said Harmon.
“We anticipate that Facebook’s embracing of PhotoDNA serves as a springboard for other online service providers to take advantage of the opportunity available through NCMEC’s PhotoDNA program and, in fact, we know that others are exploring the possibility right now.”
“Facebook is befitting a model for the entire Internet industry,” Allen said, who expressed hope that pressure would be put on other online services to employ the child-porn-detecting technology.
PhotoDNA will also be minutely screening Facebook uploads for pictures of children reported missing, since youths tend to stay connected with friends at the social network even if they are dodging family, according to police.
“Facebook associating with us is just a fantastic step forward,” Harmon said in the webcast. “We plan to keep deploying and hope more partners and make this really big and help children in a large way,” Harmon added.
Not surprising though, every month Facebook users contribute more than 30 billion pieces of content including pictures, news stories, blog posts, and Web links, according to Microsoft.
“Identifying graphic child pornography in a sea of content like that is an intimidating task, but PhotoDNA is helping to find the proverbial needle in a haystack,” Harmon said in a blog post.