Facebook Boosts Its Anti-Child Porn Technology
Just last week, Florida police found 36 images of child porn on a Florida man's Facebook page. Last year an "international child porn ring" was busted on Facebook. In a bid to help catch future pervs, Facebook is rolling out some brand new anti-kiddie porn technology.
Microsoft is providing Facebook free access to its PhotoDNA technology, which compares a database of 10,000 illegal pictures from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children with photos found on the web. And according to the PhotoDNA's developers, they should find a lot of Facebook.
A network that compares 10 million images to the center's inventory of 10,000 illegal photos can expect to have about 125 hits a day, according to Hany Farid, a Dartmouth computer science professor and expert in digital imagery who worked with Microsoft to hone the technology. At least 50,000 child pornography images are being transmitted online every day, he estimated.
Users upload about 83 million photos per day to Facebook, which means PhotoDNA could theoretically catch up to 1,000 pictures of kiddie porn daily. Although it seems that even pathetic pedophiles would be smart enough to realize that Facebook, one of the most public places on the web, is not the best place to store their kiddie porn cache.