[djsumdog]

I remember some Microsoft people sued due to PTSD:

https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2017/01/12/microsoft-sued-b...

I'm not sure exactly how this works in tech. I know lawyers who have worked on child abuse cases and they had tight restrictions on the evidence. Only the trial lawyers could request access. No paralegals, no sectaries, no copies. Only select Lawyers, the jury and the judge could view the evidence, and it was all controlled by the Justice Department. (I knew a lawyer who refused to look at the evidence, only the descriptions, because he didn't think he could handle defending him otherwise. He did successfully defend him though).

I suspect for Microsoft, they have some preliminary hashing algos that automatically send known media to a particular people with the same Justice Dept exceptions and controls for chain of custody. Other people may see content of course, but it would likely get flagged and shipped to people who were authorized to deal with it. You don't want a lot of people on that list obviously, but when it's just a few people, they get a constant stream of nightmare fuel.

[disgruntledphd2]

This is a system called PhotoDNA which was developed by MS and is now used by all of the major US tech companies.

[octoberfranklin]

I imagine they don't even want the fingerprints "getting out". Imagine if you had the fingerprints and the algorithm. This can't possibly be a cryptographic hash (too fragile); it's got to be possible to find "collisions" that have no relationship to the original image, and probably don't even look like images of anything at all.

Imagine the chaos someone could cause.

It'd be like back in 2010ish when somebody encoded a bunch of malware into bitcoin transactions: every bitcoin node running any kind of antivirus software was immediately kicked offline. Many AV programs deleted their owners' copy of bitcoind. It was madness. Forced the bitcoin developers to store the blockchain on-disk xored with a different random number unique to each computer.