Tag: picture

UK police to build a paedophile picture database

Posted on December 3, 2014 by - News

yewtreeData taken from tens of millions of child abuse photos and videos will shortly be used as part of a new police system.

Dubbed the Child Abuse Image Database (Caid) the new system will be launched by the Prime Minister at an internet safety event on Thursday 11 December.

The big idea is to avoid offices duplicating each other’s’ efforts when cataloguing identical copied images. It was created by a team of coders working in central Gothenburg, Sweden with the idea of transforming the way child abuse investigations were carried out in the UK.

It could see investigations being reduced from months to days

Basically when Inspector Knacker of the yard seizes computers, mobile devices or USB memory sticks they find hundreds of thousands of images on them. They have to go through the images manually one by one to categorise their severity and consider a prosecution.

Some material is never analysed, meaning new victims are not identified and cannot be rescued.

The software would help automate more of the process by enabling investigators to spend more time looking at the new material, instead of looking at the same images over again.

Caid uses a hash value for each picture which means that detectives will be able to plug seized hard drives into the system so they can be scanned and their contents similarly encoded to see if the resulting signatures match.

The system should be able to identify known images, classify the content, and flag up those never seen before within minutes.

Caid will also be able to use GPS data from photographs to pinpoint where they were taken.

However a similar system, called Childbase, was launched in 2003 by Ceop and the Home Office. It contained seven million images and used facial-recognition software. It was rolled out to police forces across the UK, but in 2011 it was switched off because of a lack of trained officers.

Marketing firms scan online snaps

Posted on October 16, 2014 by - News

19th-century-photographerMarketing firms are scanning the 1.8 billion photos posted every day to social media sites such as Instagram and Facebook looking for clues about what to peddle you.

US company Ditto Labs has created a program which ‘reads’ digital photos Software scans photos for brands and analyses the facial expression with it.

This data then builds profiles of people to help targeted advertising. Apparently, this is being used by Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Procter & Gamble and Adidas.

The software, created by Ditto Labs in Massachusetts, also ‘reads’ the background, the person’s clothing and even the location of the photo in a bid to glean as much information as possible as the customer and how they view the product or brand.

The wealth of information is then used to set up a profile which spells out exactly how that customer should be targeted by advertisers.

Liberty rights campaigners have warned the process goes ‘far beyond’ what most users should expect and that companies should seek permission before passing on the information to third parties.

Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, a campaign group set up to challenge policies which it believes threatens privacy, said  scanning our photos for logos and certain backdrops will go far beyond what many would expect companies to do with the photos we post.

“If companies want to use our data in this way, explicit permission should be sought. It is also only right that users ask for complete transparency about what data will be collected, analysed and who it will be sold on to,” she said.

Computer scientists began creating the program more than a decade ago. Other brands include Adidas, which, through the program, discovered that 13 percent of its ‘Adidas population’ are also interested in Justin Bieber. Of course, 87 percent want him killed on sight. Budweiser has found that beer drinking generally peaks at 11PM, presumably because its customers are returning their rented product.