Microsoft sniffed out child porn pics on a user’s OneDrive account and tipped-off the police, leading to the arrest of a man from Pennsylvania.
BBC reported that a man from Pennsylvania, in his late twenties, was arrested following a tip-off from Microsoft about child porn pictures in his OneDrive account.
The police arrested the man on July 31 and his court appearance is scheduled for next week.
The man acknowledged that he acquired the pictures from Kik Messenger, a chat app, and also to trading and receiving images of child pornography on his mobile.
The BBC spoke to one of the officers involved, Trooper Christopher Hill from the Pennsylvania State Police, who confirmed the affidavit was genuine and that Microsoft had instigated the investigation. However, the case is still an open investigation and more details could not be revealed.
Microsoft has its terms and conditions for US users in place, which states that it has the rights to deploy automated technologies to detect child pornography or abusive behaviour which may harm their system, their customers and others.
Microsoft did not directly handover the pictures found in the mailbox to the authorities. Instead, they contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's CyberTipline, which serves as the US's centralised reporting system for suspected child sexual exploitation.
Microsoft has openly discussed its use of image-processing software to detect suspected paedophiles in the past, including an interview with the BBC in 2012.
BBC also stated that following the most recent case, Mark Lamb from the company's Digital Crimes Unit released a statement. "Child pornography violates the law as well as our terms of service, which makes clear that we use automated technologies to detect abusive behaviour that may harm our customers or others," he wrote.
Microsoft has the PhotoDNA Technology in place to help law enforcement fight child pornography. PhotoDNA is an image-matching technology developed by Microsoft Research in collaboration with Dartmouth College. It creates a unique signature for a digital image, something like a fingerprint, which can be compared with the signatures of other images to find copies of that image. NCMEC and online service providers such as Microsoft and Facebook currently use PhotoDNA to help find, report and eliminate some of the worst known images of child pornography online, helping identify thousands of these horrific images that would previously have gone undetected.
By arming law enforcement with this powerful technology, Microsoft’s goal is to help expedite investigations, limit officer exposure to the corrosive effects of viewing child rape images, and strengthen law enforcement’s ability to quickly identify and rescue victims and get child abusers off the street.
