A Pennsylvania man has been arrested on child pornography charges after Microsoft tipped off law enforcement that he had uploaded a pair of illicit images to his OneDrive account, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by The Smoking Gun.
The man, 20-year-old Tyler Hoffman, allegedly obtained the images through the Kik messenger app on his smartphone and then uploaded them to Microsoft’s online storage service. Microsoft then informed the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about the OneDrive account, and the fact that it was linked with Hoffman’s Facebook profile. That information was passed off to the Pennsylvania State Police.
Microsoft was able to detect the images through the use of PhotoDNA, technology that it developed alongside Dartmouth College, which is designed to make it possible to identify images and tip law enforcement without requiring staff to look at the offending files. The same technology is used by a variety of tech companies, including Facebook and Twitter.
That’s in line with Microsoft’s Services Agreement, which says that the company deploys “automated technologies to detect child pornography or abusive behavior that might harm the system, our customers, or others.”
The news comes after a Texas man was arrested on child porn charges after Google sent a tip to law enforcement about the contents of an email he sent using Gmail. Google also uses PhotoDNA, alongside some of its own home-grown technology, to run its image-detection algorithms.
