Google to tackle child abuse images

**Bald Bouncer** · 17th June 2013

Classification systems will help spot images of abuse online

Google has announced a plan to do more to tackle online images of child sexual abuse.

Using both technology and funding, it hopes to find and eradicate images and track down abusers.

Google said it was helping create a database of images to improve collaboration between law enforcement, companies and anti-abuse charities.

It has also set up a $2m (�1.3m) fund to bankroll developers creating better tools to tackle images.

Spot and stop

Web firms in the UK have been at the centre of the debate about online images showing the sexual abuse of children following two high profile court cases in which offenders were known to have sought child pornography online.

Google said that since 2008 it had used technology that classified images giving them a unique identifier or "hash" to make it easier to spot abuse pictures.

The blogpost said it was going further by helping to create unique fingerprints of images it saw and then contributing them to a larger industry-wide database. This, it said, was helping police forces, companies and charities working together to detect and remove images. This co-operation would also help track down abusers, it said.

Google has also put $2m into what it called a Child Protection Technology Fund that would reward software developers who were working on programs to help eradicate abuse images.

"We're in the business of making information widely available, but there's certain 'information' that should never be created or found," wrote Jacquelline Fuller, director of Google Giving, in the blogpost.

"We can do a lot to ensure it's not available online - and that when people try to share this disgusting content they are caught and prosecuted," she added.

Christian Berg, co-founder of NetClean which helped to pioneer the classification of images shared online by abusers and paedophi1es, said there were many other initiatives already underway that helped to spot the pictures Google was targeting.

As well as hashing systems, police forces around the world and cross-border agencies such as Interpol were using a tool known as PhotoDNA to identify images. This, he said, was a more reliable way of producing a signature of an image as it could survive changes made to images as they were cropped, re-sized or manipulated by paedophi1es in a bid to hide them.

Microsoft, Facebook and others had already adopted PhotoDNA and were using it to stop images of child sexual abuse being shared by their users, said Mr Berg.

Despite this, he said, Google's initiative was a good move.

"We welcome them to the field and it's great that they have put attention on the problem," he said.

BBC News Technology

**evilsatan** · 17th June 2013

From what I gather PhotoDNA uses code (EXIF??) from one image to find other images taken from that camera or edited by that person over the net, either that or it creates a 'fingerprint' from the data contained in an image when uploaded and cross-references that with other photos. So if you find one image you are able to search for more from the same person to remove them.

I wonder if any organisations are trying to do the same on Deepnet or if it is just to get it our of the public domain so prevent bad publicity.

**Bald Bouncer** · 17th June 2013

Originally Posted by evilsatan

From what I gather PhotoDNA uses code (EXIF??) from one image to find other images taken from that camera or edited by that person over the net, either that or it creates a 'fingerprint' from the data contained in an image when uploaded and cross-references that with other photos. So if you find one image you are able to search for more from the same person to remove them.

I wonder if any organisations are trying to do the same on Deepnet or if it is just to get it our of the public domain so prevent bad publicity.

To be honest and as brutal as it sounds most of what is done or is said is lip service as there is no real interest because no big business lose money through child exploitation/porn, no governments lose revenue, there is no industry that big business can steal and no industry governments can tax, it's not a resource they can invade a country to steal so they appease the people with things like this when the reality is this just irritates them and is a distraction from making money for themselves.

The only real time they take an interest is when they can push an agenda through for themselves under the guise of stopping child pornography and exploitation.

**tombott** · 17th June 2013

Originally Posted by evilsatan

From what I gather PhotoDNA uses code (EXIF??) from one image to find other images taken from that camera or edited by that person over the net, either that or it creates a 'fingerprint' from the data contained in an image when uploaded and cross-references that with other photos. So if you find one image you are able to search for more from the same person to remove them.

I wonder if any organisations are trying to do the same on Deepnet or if it is just to get it our of the public domain so prevent bad publicity.

I cannot see anyway they could do the same on Deepnet or tor.

**evilsatan** · 17th June 2013

Originally Posted by tombott

I cannot see anyway they could do the same on Deepnet or tor.

I thought as much, so they will only catch/stop stupid paedos then... I'm sure there are some organisations which do it for the right reasons but BBs post is whyi imagine there isn't a strong international effort with government authorities getting heavily involved.