If there is one thing that unites Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo nowadays, it is the cause to put a halt to child pornography on the internet.
These tech companies are now working with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in implementing a new system that will detect and block pornographic images of children online. IWF is a UK-based and registered charitable foundation which acts as a dogwatch for child abuse, including child pornography, committed via the internet.
The system, developed by Google, enables the tagging of images of sexual abuse with unique hashes which essentially are codes that serve like a digital fingerprint. Every image has been assessed by a highly trained analyst. The hash is generated by an algorithm and when assigned to an image, since it is unique, will make it easy to identify a particular image against a list of offending hashes. A record of all the hashes, shared for now only to the five internet giants, is kept by IWF, but will be rolled out to other members in the future.
Once implemented, scanning of any image that is uploaded to Twitter, Facebook or any of the other participating sites, will take place. If the image has been previously tagged by the IWF, the system will detect its hash and will automatically prevent the image from being uploaded and from being shared consequently. All copies of a particular image will produce the same hash value, so when an attempt to share the image is made on any of the sites, the company will block that image.
A system similar to this is already being used by Google, Dropbox, and other companies, to prevent the sharing of files with copyright protection.
At present, IWF can remove 500 web images committing child pornography, and the number will increase once more images are identified and the hash list finally grows.
