Definition
- The development of innovative technological solutions that enhance existing approaches to preventing and tackling online CSEA or enable the development of new approaches.
- The proactive sharing by industry of its unique knowledge and skillset with appropriate stakeholders to enhance collective efforts to reduce online CSEA.
Why is it needed?
- Technology companies have the expertise to predict technological developments and identify new and emerging online trends and patterns that could be exploited by child sex offenders. Considered with other stakeholders’ knowledge of offender and victim behaviours, such insights could enhance the development of new approaches and allow law enforcement to safeguard and protect more victims and potential victims.
Good practice
- A number of the leading international technology companies have invested heavily in recent years in developing new and innovative tools and techniques to prevent and tackle online CSEA on their platforms. An example: companies have developed sophisticated tools and techniques to prevent offenders from accessing Child Sexual Abuse Material on the open Internet, leading to a global reduction in the number of people accessing this illegal material through search engines, webmail and social media platforms.Companies are encouraged to share this and other best practices as widely as possible.
- Making tools available for free to other technology companies will enable more service providers to have efficient techniques in place to identify and remove child sexual abuse material from their services and prevent online sexual exploitation. An example is Microsoft’s free PhotoDNA technology that enables users to identify known images of child sexual abuse on their services through hash comparison and matching.
- There are additional positive actions that individual companies can take to help keep their platform/service as safe as possible for children, including: signposting support services; signposting local authorities to report inappropriate sexual contact or material online; specifying terms and conditions or codes of conduct that explicitly forbid child sexual abuse content; developing and implementing robust notice and takedown processes for child sexual abuse material, and blocking access to child sexual abuse material hosted that has not been removed at source.
- Harmonising policies between companies regarding online child sexual exploitation and abuse, and sharing good practices and lessons learnt, is a vital part of enabling more online services to prevent and disrupt child sexual offending on their services.