The internet can literally only agree on one thing: child pornography is awful and the worst. And if there’s one place I don’t want that bile winding up, it’s on my precious Facebook. Microsoft to the illegal-photo-tracking rescue.
The tech, called PhotoDNA, cross-references photos—even if they’ve been cropped or edited—against a giant database of illegal images. Each vile pic has its own hash, and PhotoDNA is able to detect even a snippet of it—kind of like the way a virus scanner picks up malware. Now, I’m no child porn purveyor, but Facebook strikes me as a poor place to house your disgusting crime hobby. You know, being a social network with over half a billion users and whatnot. Still—anyone deranged enough to trade in child porn is perhaps crazy enough to think Facebook’s a reasonable place to store it, so it’s nice to see some safeguards in place. [NYT]