Cloudflare Makes It Easier For All Its Users To Help Stop Child Porn Distribution

Cloudflare Makes It Easier For All Its Users To Help Stop Child Porn Distribution

4 years ago
Anonymous $mKxHd64frN

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191221/00111743617/cloudflare-makes-it-easier-all-users-to-help-stop-child-porn-distribution.shtml

We recently wrote about how Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal are preparing for FOSTA 2.0, this time focused on child porn -- which is now being renamed as "Child Sexual Abuse Material" or "CSAM." As part of that story, we highlighted that these two Senators and some of their colleagues had begun grandstanding against tech companies in response to a misleading NY Times article that seemed to blame internet companies for the rising number of reports to NCMEC of CSAM found on the internet, when that should be seen as more evidence of how much the companies are doing to try to stop CSAM.

Of course, working with NCMEC and other such organizations takes a lot of effort. Being able to scan for shared hashes of CSAM isn't something that every internet site can do. It's mostly just done by the larger companies. But last week Cloudflare (one of the companies that Senators are demanding "answers" from), did something quite fascinating: it enabled all Cloudlfare users, no matter what level of service, to start using Cloudflare CSAM scanning tools for free, even allowing them to set their own rules and preferences (something that might become very, very important if the Graham/Blumenthal bill becomes the law.