NYT: Child Abusers Run Rampant as Tech Companies Look the Other Way [How many pictures of MCPS students are circulating on the Internet today?]

The two sisters live in fear of being recognized. One grew out her bangs and took to wearing hoodies. The other dyed her hair black. Both avoid looking the way they did as children.

Ten years ago, their father did the unthinkable: He posted explicit photos and videos on the internet of them, just 7 and 11 at the time. Many captured violent assaults in their Midwestern home, including him and another man drugging and raping the 7-year-old.

The men are now in prison, but in a cruel consequence of the digital era, their crimes are finding new audiences. The two sisters are among the first generation of child sexual abuse victims whose anguish has been preserved on the internet, seemingly forever.

This year alone, photos and videos of the sisters were found in over 130 child sexual abuse investigations involving mobile phones, computers and cloud storage accounts.

The digital trail of abuse — often stored on Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive — haunts the sisters relentlessly, they say, as does the fear of a predator recognizing them from the images...

...Amazon, whose cloud storage services handle millions of uploads and downloads every second, does not even look for the imagery. Apple does not scan its cloud storage, according to federal authorities, and encrypts its messaging app, making detection virtually impossible. Dropbox, Google and Microsoft’s consumer products scan for illegal images, but only when someone shares them, not when they are uploaded.

And other companies, including Snapchat and Yahoo, look for photos but not videos, even though illicit video content has been exploding for years. (When asked about its video scanning, a Dropbox spokeswoman in July said it was not a “top priority.” On Thursday, the company said it had begun scanning some videos last month.)..

...During the trial, an investigator said that offenders often knew that live streams are harder to detect and leave no record.

“That’s why they go to Zoom,” said the federal prosecutor in the case, Austin Berry, during his closing remarks. “It’s the Netflix of child pornography.” Prosecutions in other cases have involved live streaming on Apple’s FaceTime, Facebook, Omegle, Skype, YouNow and others...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-child-sex-abuse.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage