Child Pornography : Detection and Prevention Using Technology

There are many organisations of all sizes that are committed to fight against Child Pornography and Child sex abuse. They are from civil society groups and specialist NGOs to other technology companies, and I too work in this field by contributing my thoughts occasionally as a Lawyer handling such cases. This article is compilation of latest softwares available for combating the crime of child sex abuse or child Pornography using technology.

Microsoft developed PhotoDNA, which is used by NCMEC and online service providers to prevent the redistribution of child Pornography and child sex images.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) similarly works with internet companies to remove child Pornography and child sex images from servers, and collect evidence for police investigations.

Google also scans for child Pornography and child sex images across its Apps  including YouTube, and through a content safety API helps companies like Facebook detect child Pornography and child sex images material .

A forensic tool called Child Protection System, which scans file-sharing networks and chatrooms to find computers that are downloading photos and videos depicting the sexual abuse of prepubescent children. The software, developed by the Child Rescue Coalition, a Florida-based nonprofit, can help establish the probable cause needed to get a police search warrant.

The Child Protection System, which lets police officers search by country, state, city or county, displays a ranked list of the internet addresses downloading the most problematic files. The tool looks for images that have been reported to or seized by police and categorized as depicting children under age 12.

The AI tool, called Safer, is developed by non-profit Thorn to assist businesses which do not have in-house filtering systems to detect and remove such images. Safer is one tool which could help with quickly flagging child abuse content to limit the harm caused.The detection services of Safer include Image Hash Matching, CSAM Image Classifier, Video Hash Matching, SaferList for Detection.

Netclean is the AI based software company indicates that its product, Net Clean ProActive, “detects when child sexual abuse material is being handled in your IT-environment. Similar to anti-virus software, but instead of detecting computer viruses, ProActive finds images and videos that law enforcement has classified as child sexual abuse material.”

Apple plans to scan iPhones for images of child sexual abuse, The tool designed to detect known images of child sexual abuse, called "neuralMatch," will scan images before they are uploaded to iCloud. If it finds a match, a human will review the image. If child pornography is confirmed, the user's account will be disabled and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children will be notified. The system will not flag images not already in the center's child pornography database.

All efforts are made by sane organisations to combat this elephant in the room, efforts by the organisations and companies mentioned above is a method where Technolgy is used to solve a daily problem . I feel we accepting the reality that problem exist in our society brings in many solutions.