Students Facebook Photos End Up On Kiddie Porn Site @McAfeeConsumer

16 Feb 2012 · 2 min

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The segment reports that Facebook profile pictures of at least 17 high‑school girls from Bay Path Regional Voc‑Tech in Charlton, Massachusetts, were discovered on a child‑pornography website that operates via an anonymous message board, making the source of the uploads difficult to trace. Law‑enforcement agencies—including the Worcester County District Attorney, the FBI, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office—are reviewing whether the site violates privacy laws and whether it meets the threshold for a formal investigation. Security expert Robert Siciliano explains that technologies such as photo fingerprinting and facial‑recognition could, if adopted by platforms like Facebook, help prevent such misuse, but these tools are not yet widely implemented, leaving consumers largely on their own. The U.S. Attorney’s Office advises parents to either search the site themselves or ask their children directly, and if a child’s image is found, to contact local police or the district attorney.

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Thanks. There is another story involving Facebook tonight that has a lot of parents wondering what they can do to protect their kids. We told you about this last night. Facebook profile pictures of dozens of Massachusetts high school girls recently found on a site that also contains child pornography. The site— we're not going to name it— uses an anonymous message board, making it hard to trace who's uploading these pictures. We know that the Worcester County District Attorney, the FBI, the U.S. Attorney, they're all looking into how these Facebook profile pictures of at least 17 girls from the Bay Path Regional Voc Tech School at a school in Charlton ended up on this pornographic website. The pictures of these girls, they're fully clothed, they were reproduced. We also know that this website could be based overseas, but today, contacts at the FBI telling us they are currently reviewing whether or not this case meets the threshold for investigation. In other words, if this website is violating any privacy laws by using the Facebook profile pictures of these teenage girls here in Massachusetts. Now earlier, we did speak with a security expert about what you can do to stop this from happening.
There are, um, numerous technologies out there that they're essentially, uh, fingerprinting for photographs, uh, facial recognition, uh, that, uh, if implemented by, say, Facebook going forward, could work towards solving the problem. However, it's not ubiquitous. It's not, uh, currently, uh, within Facebook. And that means that, uh, up until then, if that ever happens, uh, consumers are on their own.
Well, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, parents also have two options. You can actually go on that site, or you can ask your child if they have a picture on there. And if you do find your child's picture, contact your local police department or the District Attorney's Office.