The Philippine Online Chronicles

Facebook and Microsoft have launched a joint effort to combat online child pornography using new tools and technologies that will prevent the distribution of images of child sexual abuse online.

Both companies joined the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) PhotoDNA program, which will utilizes Microsoft's PhotoDNA technology to scour Facebook's more than 500 million profile pages for possible incidences of child exploitation.

PhotoDNA is a refined image-matching technology created by Microsoft Research in collaboration with Dartmouth College to identify child porn images even if they are cropped or altered. It can quickly and accurately scour through large amounts of data to police the world’s largest online services.

Facebook, currently the largest photo-sharing site, will be the first online service to join the project. PhotoDNA has begun to hunt for several thousand registered illegal images among the 200 million images uploaded by Facebook users each day.

Bill Harmon, associate general counsel of Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit said PhotoDNA gives online service providers an effective tool to take more proactive action to stop the distribution of known images of child sexual abuse online.

PhotoDNA can identify known child pornography images amongst Facebook’s more than 30 billion pieces of shared content online, including photos, Web links, news stories, and blog posts.

He said Facebook's participation in the program will significantly expand its impact "Identifying graphic child pornography in a sea of content like that is a daunting task, but PhotoDNA is helping to find the proverbial needle in a haystack," he said.

Harmon said Facebook’s bold step forward to become the first online service provider to join Microsoft in partnership with NCMEC sends a strong message: "We will not tolerate the use of our services to victimize children in this way when we have the technology to do something about it."

According to Ernie Allen, chief executive of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, “Our hope and belief is that Facebook will be just the first of many” companies to use what has proven to be highly effective technology. "Online services are going to become a hostile place for child pornographers and pedophilesh,” he added.

Harmon further said in a New York Times report that online service providers have an effective tool to take more proactive action to stop the distribution of known images of child sexual abuse online.

Since 2002, the NCMEC had reviewed and analyzed almost 49 million photos and videos of child pornography, including more than 13 million in 2010 alone. The victims in these images are reportedly getting younger as pedophiles prey on pre-verbal children who cannot ask for help, Allen noted.

Out of the more than 3,500 children depicted in commonly traded images who have been identified by law enforcement, 10 percent are infants and toddlers and 67 percent are prepubescent.

The program aims to remove online the worst of the worst images which are often shared over and over again. It aims on images of children under 12. ”Child pornography is growing increasingly violent and depicting increasingly young children, including infants and toddlers.”

“These are crime scene photos,” not porn, Mr. Allen said. “This tool (PhotoDNA) is essential to protect these victims and to prevent, to the greatest degree possible, the redistribution of their sexual abuse.”

How it works

PhotoDNA works by creating a “hash,” or digital code, to represent a given image and find instances of it within large data sets, much as antivirus software does for malicious programs.

PhotoDNA’ s “robust hashes” are able to find images even if they have been altered significantly. Tests on Microsoft properties showed it accurately identifies images 99.7 percent of the time and sets off a false alarm only once in every 2 billion images, and most of them point to nearly identical images, according to Darthmouth computer science professor Dr. Hany Farid said.

“To create a hash, the software puts the image in black and white and into a standard size. Then it carves the image into blocks and subjects it to an array of measurements. The resulting “signatures” can be provided to online service providers, who can then use them to find these specific illegal images on their systems without possessing them or looking at customers’ private content.”

Microsoft gradually began implementing PhotoDNA technology in Bing and SkyDrive, including images posted to SkyDrive through Hotmail, to assess the capabilities of the technology.