Creating IntelliGrade
IWF’s charitable mission is to eliminate online child sexual abuse imagery and we work internationally with partners to do this.
We’re one of the few global bodies which can proactively search for this criminal imagery. We also take public reports through any of our 50 reporting portals around the world, from law enforcement, IWF Members and through our sister organisation INHOPE – the International Association of Internet Hotlines.
We ensure that the criminal imagery is assessed and removed from its source location. When we do this, we also create a ‘hash’ of that image, which is a unique code, like a digital fingerprint.
Our hashes are created in various formats (think of them like different languages) including PhotoDNA, SHA1, SHA256 and MD5.
Additionally, at IWF our expert analysts will do a full assessment of every image – adding critical information/metadata about the child and the sexual abuse that they have been subjected to. To do this we use first-of-its-kind technology called IntelliGrade.
This additional metadata relating to the context of each of those images means we now know how each hash relates to different laws in a selection of countries.
As well as hashing and enriching the data obtained from the child sexual abuse imagery that we identify as part of our everyday work, we’re also working with the images held by UK police.
IWF is the only non-law enforcement body to be granted access to the UK Home Office’s Child Abuse Image Database (CAID). Our taskforce is extracting, hashing and enriching the data obtained from two million category A and B child sexual abuse images.