The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (Canadian Centre) introduced a new tool to combat the growing proliferation of child sexual abuse material on the Internet. Dubbed ‘Project Arachnid’, this automated crawler will help reduce the online availability of child sexual abuse material and break the cycle of abuse.
Project Arachnid detects images and videos of child sexual abuse material based on confirmed digital fingerprints of illegal content. Once content has been identified, a notice is sent to the hosting provider to request its immediate removal. This innovative tool detects content at a speed exponentially faster than current methods. In a very short period of only six weeks, Project Arachnid:
- Processed over 230 million web pages
- Detected over 5.1 million unique web pages hosting child sexual abuse material
- Detected over 40,000 unique images of child sexual abuse material