“Every time I see someone looking at me,
I wonder if they know.
If they’ve seen the pictures.
Sometimes it feels like I’m being abused
over and over again.”
In the dark throes of the web,
every day under the cover of anonymity,
technology is being misused to share images
of child sexual abuse across the world.
And with every single share, victims are forced
to relive their abuse over and over again.
To fight fire with fire, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection
has created Project Arachnid,
virtual crawlers that scour the internet
to find and remove images of child sexual abuse.
To identify these images, Arachnid uses
a groundbreaking combination of Microsoft’s PhotoDNA technology,
along with digital fingerprints received from institutions
like the RCMP and Interpol.
Now even if the image has been cropped, reformatted,
or augmented in any way,
the crawlers find the matching images and help take them down.
Arachnid is a giant step forward
in helping victims of child sexual abuse reclaim their lives.
But the battleground shifts every day as technology evolves
and offenders find new ways to victimize and evade.
And while we vow to relentlessly fight on the front lines every day,
we need your support.
So please, share this video
and help break the cycle of abuse.