How Ashton Kutcher’s ‘non-profit start-up’ makes millions from the EU’s fight against child abuse on the net::The ‘non-profit start-up’ Thorn, founded by actor Ashton Kutcher, is a driving force behind the EU’s campaign to scan the net for child abuse material. Newly public documents and financial information obtained by Follow the Money reveal the blurred boundaries between Thorn’s do-good public face and the powerful business behind it.
It sounds like they have a database of CSAM images, so they’re likely hashing parts of the suspected image or video and searching for that hash in the database
Right, so I guess the software is doing that prior to it being encrypted and sent.
Is the problem that it could do more than just scan for CSAM, ie. Anything that the government, or dictator, decides?
That’s exactly the risk. There’s no way to implement this type of client side scanning without building infrastructure that can then also be used to scan for other things.
Got it. Thanks!
This isn’t like an anti-virus system. You can’t just catalog them all. It’s too easy to create. Hell, with the advent of LLMs and AI-generated images, it’s going to be even easier to create.
Too easy to create and too easy to foil the hash, unless it’s some kind of highly sophisticated feature-based hashing.