Facebook Adopts PhotoDNA Technology to Fight Against Child Abuse

Facebook and Microsoft come hand in hand to fight against child pornography. The social network giant Facebook adopts PhotoDNA technology co-invented by Microsoft Corporation to find child pornography on its site.

Microsoft and Dartmouth College together invented PhotoDNA technology to identify and remove images that exploit or endanger children.

Facebook will run PhotoDNA on all images uploaded to the site to help find and block images showing child pornography. The technology will also help Facebook report incidents to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the police, to allow them to take immediate action, according to Chris Sonderby, assistant general counsel at Facebook.

PhotoDNA works by creating a signature for every image, similar to a fingerprint, and comparing that to signatures of known images. The signature is created by first converting the image to black and white, resizing it and breaking it up into a grid of cells. In each cell changes in brightness are analyzed, and the signature is created from this information. The amount of data in each signature is small, which makes finding matches easier and “finding the needle in the haystack” possible, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft currently uses PhotoDNA in Bing, Skydrive and Hotmail.

PhotoDNA Technology