Early this week, Google tipped off the authorities after they discovered child pornography in a man’s Gmail. It has now come out that both Google and Microsoft have both recently tipped off the police to illegal materials in several users accounts. Facebook is the latest compnay to confirm that it also keeps an eye on users’ images, to scan for “explicit photos of children.” And this is done using PhotoDNA technology.
The social giant confirmed this information via a spokesperson to the folks at Business Insider, who said that
“There is no place for child exploitative content on Facebook. We use PhotoDNA to check that each image which is uploaded to our site is not a known child abuse image.”
PhotoDNA is very intelligent in that if the image pulls up a match, it won’t be uploaded to the social networking website, and the account that tried to upload it will be disabled. Facebook also further goes on to flag the content “to NCMEC” to carry on a further investigation.
Bottom line don’t store anything unlawful to any of these cloud and social media platforms.
