Microsoft scans email for child abuse images, leads to arrest by Lisa Vaas.
From the post:
It’s not just Google.
Microsoft is also scanning for child-abuse images.
A recent tip-off from Microsoft to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) hotline led to the arrest on 31 July 2014 of a 20-year-old Pennsylvanian man in the US.
According to the affidavit of probable cause, posted on Smoking Gun, Tyler James Hoffman has been charged with receiving and sharing child-abuse images.
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Shades of the days when Kodak would censor film submitted for development.
Lisa reviews the PhotoDNA techniques used by Microsoft and concludes:
The recent successes of PhotoDNA in leading both Microsoft and Google to ferret out child predators is a tribute to Microsoft’s development efforts in coming up with a good tool in the fight against child abuse.
In this particular instance, given this particular use of hash identifiers, it sounds as though those innocent of this particular type of crime have nothing to fear from automated email scanning.
No sane person supports child abuse so the outcome of the case doesn’t bother me.
However, the use of PhotoDNA isn’t limited to photos of abused children. The same technique could be applied to photos of police officers abusing protesters (wonder where you would find those?), etc.
Before anyone applauds Microsoft for taking the role of censor (in the Roman sense), remember that corporate policies change. The goals of email scanning may not be so agreeable tomorrow.