Update: John Shenan, executive director of NCMEC's exploited children division said that the database shared with service providers has data for about 16,000 images, he said, all submitted by service providers themselves. But they acknowledged that the company uses a database of mathematical fingerprints of known images of children generated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Verizon officials would not go into the particulars of how it scans customers' content. 'All we do is follow the law,' said Verizon spokesperson Linda Laughlin. Providers have a 'duty to report' to the NCMEC if their users access or store child pornography in the last six months of 2012, the Cyber Tipline handled 113,009 reports of child pornography from electronic service providers.

Since the passage of the PROTECT Act, sponsored by then-Senator Joseph Biden Jr., service providers have been required to register with the NCMEC's Cyber Tipline, operated in coordination with federal, state, and local law enforcement. The 67-year-old deacon of a Catholic church in Baltimore County didn’t realize he was giving away his secret-after he allegedly uploaded pornographic images and videos of children to his Online Backup and Sharing cloud account, they were scanned by a Verizon partner using technology that can automatically check images and videos for the presence of children known to be the victims of pornographers. William Albaugh found this out the hard way when he backed up his home computer to Verizon's online backup service. But while checking is still voluntary, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been pushing providers to use image-matching technology to help stop the spread of child pornography. When Congress passed the PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008 mandating that service providers report suspected child pornography in the content that their customers surf and store, the law gave providers an out: if they couldn't check, they wouldn't know, and they wouldn't have to report it. But cloud-based services are increasingly checking user-uploaded data for illegal content-particularly child pornography. They can share your data across multiple computers.

They can back up your personal data and keep it from being lost if your system crashes. This story has been updated with information from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Baltimore County Police Department.Ĭloud-based storage services are no doubt useful.

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