We’re deeply supportive of their important work in the fight against the exploitation of children.ĭropbox is hardly the only cloud service to work with police in this way. NCMEC reviews and refers our reports to the appropriate authorities. Whenever law enforcement agencies, child safety organizations or private individuals alert us of suspected child exploitation imagery, we act quickly to report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). The company, however, declined to provide official details of its policies beyond a stock statement it has issued in the past:Ĭhild exploitation is a horrific crime. It is also possible Dropbox, in these cases, may be responding to a federal reporting law that obliges internet services to report discoveries of child pornography to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Other news reports likewise point to Dropbox tipping off federal or state authorities the tips can give police an IP address, which can in turn yield a physical location where the illegal activity originated. The upshot, Ars suggests, is that Dropbox may be using PhotoDNA, an image processing tool developed by Microsoft (or another tool like it), in order to detect child pornography stored on its service. No one, that is, except the company itself: “this only makes content sent to Dropbox secure from outsiders-not from Dropbox itself. But it also raises hard questions about just how Dropbox and other cloud storage services treat the private data stored by their customers.Īs Ars notes, the data customers send and store through Dropbox data is encrypted, meaning no one can decipher what’s stored there. The case is obviously a victory for law enforcement and for public safety, as Brown appears to be a sick and dangerous individual. As Ars Technica explains, it may have been Dropbox who tipped off Illinois law enforcement about Brown’s online activities, which allegedly included the possession and distribution of sexual videos of pre-teen girls. That arrest may never have occurred but for Dropbox, the popular cloud storage service where many people store photos, files, and videos.
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