14 DAY TRIAL // Google earlier this week alerted the police after finding child abuse pictures in an account belonging to one of its users, and reports are revealing that Microsoft also collaborated with investigators to track down a Pennsylvania man who stored similar photos in his account.
According to a report by BBC, the man, who’s still in his twenties, published an image with a young girl in his OneDrive account and even tried to send two illegal photos via Outlook.com.
After being arrested on July 31, the defendant explained that he received the photos on Kik Messenger chat applications and admitted to claims of “trading and receiving images of child pornography on this mobile cellular device.”
The same source reveals that the Pennsylvania State Police has already confirmed that it was Microsoft that started the whole investigation after finding the illegal photos in the man’s OneDrive account.
Before accusing Microsoft of violating users’ privacy, you should know that all photos published in a OneDrive account are automatically scanned with the help of a technology called PhotoDNA, which can detect any image that might violate the rules.
With PhotoDNA, every single photo is automatically assigned a digital signature, which is then being used to compare one image with another. This way, if a picture that’s already flagged as infringing the rules is being found in a specific account, Microsoft can be alerted and thus compare photos to determine whether the owner of the account could be subject of any law violation or not.
Here’s an excerpt from Microsoft’s own description of the tech:
“In 2009, in partnership with DCU and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Microsoft Research collaborated with Dartmouth College to develop PhotoDNA, an image-matching technology that aids in finding and removing some of the worst known images of child pornography from the Internet.
Microsoft donated the technology to NCMEC, who established a PhotoDNA-based program for online service providers to help disrupt the spread of the worst child pornography online – images which capture the rape of an identified prepubescent child.”
At this point, PhotoDNA is being used not only by Microsoft, but also by several other organizations and rival companies from all over the world, including Google and Facebook. Both have implemented this service, together with their own image scanning algorithms, to help determine whether an image is violating their rules or not and detect such child abuse photographs.