July 6, 2006
Big ISPs to Treat Child Porn Like Viruses
ISPs AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink, NetZero and Juno are joining forces to develop technology to scan for child porn on their networks.
Plans call for the missing children’s center to collect known child-porn images and create a unique mathematical signature for each one based on a common formula. Each participating company would scan its users’ images for matches.
Sounds like they will store hashes of known child porn images, and look for matching hashes.
The interesting thing is that they are comparing it to scanning for scanning for viruses, which they already do today. Scanning for viruses meant to protect themselves and their customers. There’s a clear business case for that, and relatively little privacy concerns.
Privacy advocates might be alarmed by this, but there’s not need to be. They seem to have each had their own ado way of doing this in the past, now they are just pooling their best practices to increase their effectiveness; thus protecting society at large. Bravo!
ISPs Take Aim at Child Porn [Wired]
Press Release [National Center for Missing & Exploited Children]
