Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo officially announced that they would use an automated system to detect and block child pornography images.
The five companies are partnering with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which will provide access to the database of child pornography images it has collected.
Using technology developed by Google engineers in collaboration with Microsoft, companies will scan the digital fingerprint of each image and compare the results with the IWF database.
This way they will be able to prevent users from uploading and sharing such photos.
The digital fingerprint, commonly referred to as a hash, is unique to each image and has also been used in the past by the aforementioned companies to allow copyright owners to report misuse of their content on the Web.
Now, the same technology used by RIAA and MPAA will be used to better combat users who flood the Web with images of abused children every day.
For now, only five companies have expressed their interest in implementing this system, but others will likely join soon.
Along with the five companies we mentioned as members of the Internet Watch Foundation, there are also Apple, AOL, Cisco, Dropbox, GoDaddy, OpenDNS, Sophos, Symantec, Tumblr, and many others.
However, we should mention that this technique will only show results on the surface web, and not on the Dark Net, which is where the problem begins.
So one could say that this move by the big internet companies is more of an act of sensationalism to get credit, as the problem will not be solved.
