![]() Other news reports likewise point to Dropbox tipping off federal or state authorities the tips can give police an IP address, which can in turn yield a physical location where the illegal activity originated. The upshot, Ars suggests, is that Dropbox may be using PhotoDNA, an image processing tool developed by Microsoft (or another tool like it), in order to detect child pornography stored on its service. No one, that is, except the company itself: “this only makes content sent to Dropbox secure from outsiders-not from Dropbox itself. But it also raises hard questions about just how Dropbox and other cloud storage services treat the private data stored by their customers.Īs Ars notes, the data customers send and store through Dropbox data is encrypted, meaning no one can decipher what’s stored there. The case is obviously a victory for law enforcement and for public safety, as Brown appears to be a sick and dangerous individual. As Ars Technica explains, it may have been Dropbox who tipped off Illinois law enforcement about Brown’s online activities, which allegedly included the possession and distribution of sexual videos of pre-teen girls. I think it would be good to reflect that in the headline, because while most everyone knows what child porn means, calling it such mentally associates it with the pornography aspect (the end user) rather than the victim (the child).That arrest may never have occurred but for Dropbox, the popular cloud storage service where many people store photos, files, and videos. That is always the focus, in my experience.Ī final note - the child protection industry is keen to remove the word pornography from the lexicon, and to refer to this type of material as "child abuse" or "child exploitation" material. I get nervous and uncomfortable when the "think of the children" argument is misused during discussions involving encryption, intellectual property violations, and general freedoms - but I'm aware that on some occasions it is important.Ī lot of work goes into identifying and where possible rescuing the children involved in this stuff, and preventing more. The courts where I live (Australia) take this quite seriously and are aware that a balance must be struck. This is indeed one of those cases where your privacy, and the rights you have over your property, are impinged upon as a regular person. Sometimes content will simply be removed. In practice, often an American content host will let NCMEC know, since they compile and forward on reports to law enforcement. This means different things depending on the type of content, the country, and lots of other moving parts, but it is the "safety of the children" argument at work. If the reason for your report is that the content involves child abuse, then the company is generally accountable for checking it out. You might have once reported a post on facebook, a file link on dropbox, or an image on imgur (to take a few examples) for being bad in some way. Most companies that host content have a "report" function. A similar flavor of this: someone sent Brian Krebs heroin in the mail, and then "tipped off" the police. It could be pretty difficult to prove that someone did this if the company's logs were inadequate. They're required by law to report it once they have reasonable suspicion.Īn interesting abuse edge case here I've pondered for a while: someone hacks into your account and intentionally posts bad stuff to get you in trouble. They almost certainly have a human verify the validity before reporting (which is probably a 100% manual process). It's all automated, likely triggered by uploads of certain types of files (images/videos). This isn't "Dropbox employees digging through everybody's files hunting for CP". ![]() This isn't a legal mandate, they do this voluntarily. ![]() I recall someone getting charged after using Gmail in a similar way. Most service providers (including Facebook and Google) actively scan for known PhotoDNA hashes of CP provided by NCMEC and other groups, and will report if they detect and then verify any of them.
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