Image Source: jamessansonelaw
While our government was busy banning pornography to “combat child abuse”, Silicon Valley’s biggest giants were busy devising ways to actually fight child abuse.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have teamed up with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). They have revealed a new technology which will make it easy to tag images or content with sexually explicit material, and thus narrow down any inspection for child exploitation.
The tags will be like hashes, essentially digital fingerprints, which will be unique for different content. Once the hash is detected, it will automatically be prevented from being uploaded or shared.
As of now, the UK-based NGO is partnering with the 5 internet giants, but it hopes to widen its partnership so that all child exploiters will face justice. By current estimates, IWF says it can remove 500 web pages with explicit content everyday – a number which will grow exponentially as the hashes become more widespread.
The Logical Indian community applauds IWF and the tech companies for this novel endeavor against child pornography. These are methods that should be encouraged and practiced. We hope the Indian government takes notice and understands that there are more efficient ways of dealing with a problem than banning it.
