14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo have officially joined forces and will employ an automated system for detecting and blocking images of child pornography.
The five companies are partnering with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which will provide access to its database of child pornography images.
Using a technology developed by Google engineers, with contributions from Microsoft, the companies will be extracting a digital fingerprint for each image in the IWF database, and will use it to prevent their users from uploading and sharing such images any further.
Child pornography images will be blocked using a database of image hashes
This digital fingerprint, commonly referred to as an image hash, or hash value, is unique to each image and has also been used in the past by the aforementioned companies to allow copyright owners to report and take down their content from the Web.
Now the same technology used by RIAA and the MPAA will be put to use for a better cause and help Web companies fight users who are daily flooding the Web with images of abused children.
Only the five companies have expressed their interest in implementing this system, but as word gets out, more and more will probably want to join.
All five companies are also members of the Internet Watch Foundation, along with Apple, AOL, Cisco, Dropbox, GoDaddy, OpenDNS, Sophos, Symantec, Tumblr, and many other more.
If initial tests go well, don't be surprised if more of them join the first five later on.
500 websites containing child pornography taken down each day
According to The Telegraph, IWF is boasting that it manages to take down around 500 websites containing child pornography and abuse each day, with at least one per day containing thousands of images.
The foundation has been able to achieve this through its database of image hashes, which will now be used by more powerful players like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and prevent those images from ever reaching a search engine's results.
