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"PhotoDNA: Developed in 2009 with Dartmouth College to help the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Microsoft PhotoDNA is a free service which helps to identify and remove online child abuse material. Hundreds of organizations and technology companies around the world are using PhotoDNA either directly through our cloud service, or indirectly through integrations with the 3rd party tools they use to perform their jobs” to reduce child exploitation by detecting illegal images by identifying the unique “hash” values of images and matching that value with a database of known illegal content.

 

Child Finder Service: Thorn and Microsoft have been working together for several years now

to fight child exploitation and human trafficking. In addition to sharing PhotoDNA

technology with Thorn, Microsoft has provided technology and volunteers in support of a

project originally called ‘Child Finder Service’; this project emerged from hackathons initiated

in 2015 and 2016, and culminated in the donation of technology to Thorn for inclusion

within their Spotlight product. These innovations have since been evolved and augmented

by other technologies and organizations to help find missing children faster."

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"The Missing Children Society of Canada has been working with Microsoft to enhance its

ability to rapidly find missing children using a combination of mobile and social tactics.

 

Missing Children Europe has been using Microsoft Dynamics to run its operations to locate

missing children across more than 30 countries in the EU. Microsoft is supportive of this

important work and proud to be providing the cloud technology needed to power this

effort.

 

Volunteers from Microsoft’s Core Services Engineering team have teamed up with the

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to develop ICRC’s Trace-The-Face system.

This allows photos of children to be matched to their families based on familial

resemblances. This solution was built using open source libraries and was deployed in

November 2019. The technical approach is described in more detail here."

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"Global Emancipation Network (GEN) is an organization that is using computer vision, text

analytics, and other AI services to identify trafficking patterns and trends across illicit content

sources around the world. Its flagship product 'Minerva' performs data analysis to look for

signals indicating possible human trafficking. Microsoft supplies GEN with technology

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resources as well as volunteers with cloud and AI expertise to help them accomplish their

mission with greater scale and intelligence.

 

Microsoft technology grants are now helping Project VIC to identify and rescue children

from sexual exploitation, including but not limited to children who are being trafficked for

sex. The self-stated goal of Project VIC is to “create an ecosystem of information and data

sharing between domestic and international law enforcement agencies all working on crimes

facilitated against children and the sexual exploitation of children.” Project VIC allows

agencies to leverage aggregate data, technologies, and innovation. Microsoft is proud to

supply this organization with foundational technology components including PhotoDNA as

well as cloud and AI elements provided by Microsoft Azure."