Engineers from some of the world’s biggest tech firms,
including Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Snap and Twitter,
worked for 2 days at a hackathon in the United States
co-hosted by the Home Secretary and Microsoft, which tasked
industry experts to come up with tools to identify online
child grooming.
A prototype tool has been developed that can be used to
automatically flag potential conversations taking place
between child groomers and children.
Home Secretary said:
We all have a responsibility to tackle online child
sexual exploitation and the new tool developed during the
hackathon is a positive step forward.
Once complete, it will be rolled out for free to other
tech companies that want to deploy it.
This is just one thing we can do together to combat this
appalling crime.
Hackathon participants analysed tens of thousands of
conversations to understand patterns used by predators.
This enabled engineers to develop technology to
automatically and accurately detect these patterns.
Potential conversations between a groomer and their victim
will be flagged so a moderator can investigate further.
Further work will take place on the prototype. Once
completed it will be licensed free of charge to smaller and
medium-sized technology companies worldwide.
During his trip to the United States the Home Secretary met
major tech firms so he can be updated on their efforts to
tackle the crime. He used the meetings to explore how
companies could make greater use of technology to
proactively find and remove abusive content from their
sites.
He noted that, while some progress had been made, companies
still had to go further and work faster to tackle online
child sexual exploitation (CSE). The Home Secretary
was thanked for his leadership and commitment to the issue
of CSE.
Online child sexual abuse will be the focus of the next
Five Country Ministerial meeting in London in summer 2019,
bringing together interior ministers and attorneys general
from the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Last week the government announced a package of measures to
tackle online CSE. This included:
- commissioning the Internet Watch Foundation to
investigate how advertising is funding CSE activity
- a taskforce, chaired by the Home Secretary, bringing
together representatives from ad agencies, trade bodies and
brands to ensure criminals don’t have access to this
funding stream
- a £250,000 innovation call for organisations to bid for
funding to assist them in developing innovative solutions
to disrupt live streaming of abuse
- new tools to improve the capabilities of the Child
Abuse Image Database (CAID) – the database used by the NCA
and UK police forces to search for indecent images of
children and increase the ability to identify victims
