US Coalition begins its battle against online child abuse

A coalition of US companies and organisations said the first phase of its fight against the dissemination of child abuse images online will be the development of a database.

The Technology Coalition, comprised of online giants, including Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) aims to collect thousands of child abuse images.

Members of the coalition, which will also work with law enforcement agencies around the world, hope that by doing this they will be able to prevent further distribution of the images by paedophiles.

"It may not be possible to eradicate all threats to children online, any more than it is possible to protect children from all threats in the physical world, " said John Ryan, Chief Counsel of AOL but he said it was a start.

The coalition plans to give each image, collected by the NCMEC, a unique digital fingerprint.

Participating companies could then develop technologies to help identify the victim or the abuser. For example they could scan user's images for the fingerprint to identify offenders.

AOL plans to check e-mail attachments that are already scanned for viruses.

"However, by better leveraging 21st century technologies, we believe it is possible to increase the chance that child predators will be caught and provide a deterrent," said John Ryan.

The group, which has pledged $1m (£550,000) to the fight the growing problem and following on from this announcement will also develop new and existing technologies to help detect child abuse on the web.

As these develop it will continue to work with industry and law enforcement agencies to catch people who distribute child pornography and deter others from doing so.

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!