Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo collaborate to fight child sex abuses images

The Internet Watch Foundation today announced that it is working with some of the biggest names in technology to stamp out child sex abuse images online. Part of the problem with stemming the flow of such images is that once they are removed from one site, it takes little time for them to reappear elsewhere.

Working in conjunction with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Yahoo, the IWF says that it intends to share image hashes with a view to making illegal images faster to identify. Three different types of hash will be created -- the familiar MD5 and SHA-1, as well as Microsoft's PhotoDNA -- helping to improve rates of detection.

IWF wants to make the hashes available to as many companies as possible so that it can have a greater impact on the content it is trying to eliminate. As well as making it possible to identify images that are already online so they can be deleted, the hashes can also be used to block the upload of known abuse images. The organization says that the system has the potential catalog millions of illegal images.

Announcing the project, the IWF said:

Hashes will only be created from images that the highly-trained IWF analysts have assessed, regardless of whether the image was sourced from a public report, a report from the online industry, an image actively found by our analysts, or an image from the Home Office’s new Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) [...] The more hashes given to the online industry, the greater the protection offered on companies’ online services.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Yahoo have already started to use the hash list, and the plan is to make it available to more companies as soon as possible. For now, it is only images that can be identified and hashed, but there are plans to trial a similar program for videos.

Photo credit: Tomislav Pinter / Shutterstock