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This allows companies all around the world to quickly compare millions of photos against a hash of known illegal content, while also respecting customer privacy. Images are instantly converted to secure hashes and the hashes are not reversible so the signature can’t be used to replicate a photo. The program isn’t scanning for photos, instead it’s looking for the signature’s numerical match. This process of identifying the image is fully automated. Those numbers represent the “hash” of the image, a.k.a its “PhotoDNA signature.” This robust hash can then be used to find that photo wherever it has been distributed on the Internet, even if the photo has been altered. This signature, or digital fingerprint, is created by converting the image into a grayscale format, creating a grid and assigning a number to each tiny square. In 2009, Microsoft partnered with Dartmouth college to develop the hash matching technology that develops a “PhotoDNA signature” for online photos that have been deemed the “worst of the worst” by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). How PhotoDNA’s digital fingerprint finds the “worst of the worst” images of child abuse We needed an easier way to identify and detect these images, and that’s how the concept for PhotoDNA was born. Finding known child sex abuse images can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Last year, thanks to PhotoDNA, the technology industry was able to disrupt the distribution of over 4 million images, a 4-fold increase over 2014.Įvery day, as many as 2 billion unique images are uploaded and shared on the Internet. They are further victimized each time that record is distributed. The children victimized in this material are first harmed when their abuse is perpetrated and recorded. One persistent, horrendous crime is the distribution of child sex abuse imagery on the Internet. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit is dedicated to helping fight the online exploitation of children. Her blog post is part of Thorn’s hashing series, which highlights the benefits of hashing technology for industry, law enforcement, nonprofits, and service providers as they work to detect and remove child sexual abuse material online. Courtney Gregoire works as a senior attorney in Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, where she fights technology-facilitated crime against vulnerable populations including children and the elderly.