“It is very depressing and nasty. Millions of pornographic images of children are being circulated on the Web,” said a senior official at Microsoft. The software major is now using technology to stop the spread of such pictures.
Since 2002, the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children has reviewed over 65 million images and videos of child sexual exploitation reported by law enforcement. Such images continue to grow increasingly violent and the victims are becoming younger, said Ms Sue Hotelling, Senior Program Manager for Child Protection Online at Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit.
Microsoft’s PhotoDNA technology helps law enforcement agencies identify and rescue these children. It tracks such images on the Internet and erases them completely. Microsoft has licensed PhotoDNA to the centre. A few thousands of photos have been matched against a database of photos they call the ‘worst of the worst’, she said.
How it works
PhotoDNA is an image-matching technology developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with Dartmouth College. Like a fingerprint, it creates a unique signature for a digital image, which can be compared with signatures of other images to find copies of that image.
“Nearly 10 per cent of images reviewed were infants and toddlers who cannot tell anyone about their abuse,” she told this correspondent during a Microsoft-sponsored trip to its headquarters in Redmond.
According to her, when child pornography images are shared and viewed amongst predators online, it is not just a distribution of objectionable content. It is community rape of a child. Images originate from all parts of the globe. NCMEC found image matches occurred across many countries, including the US, UK and Brazil.
Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is also using the same technology to filter photos uploaded by members.
In Bing, SkyDrive
Microsoft has implemented PhotoDNA technology in its search engine Bing and SkyDrive app, including images posted to SkyDrive through Hotmail. PhotoDNA identified horrific images, which would not have been found otherwise.
“We have evaluated over two billion images on our services. We need to ensure that these images of children being sexually assaulted are not redistributed,” she said.
Many images remain on the Web for a long time, years after the original abuse, she said.