Facebook who have been criticised by Britain’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre over their child protection efforts have now decided to make their social networking site more child friendly and keep paedophiles at a distance. Based on this decision Facebook have partnered with Microsoft (who is already having stake in facebook), and have announced a feature which would scan the photos uploaded by users for any child pornographic content.

The technology called PhotoDNA was developed together by Microsoft Research and Dartmouth College in 2009 for National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. This technology would take a blueprint of the photograph which is of inappropriate or offensive in nature and then do an image matching with billions of other images to locate photos with similarly inappropriate features. In a post by Bill Harmon in Microsoft blog, who is a lawyer at Microsoft’s digital crimes unit said that PhotoDNA detects child pornography with “zero false positives”.

This is not the first attempt by facebook to block any child pornographic materials into its network. Last year facebook together with MySpace, which is also another social networking site, joined then Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, now governor of New York, to develop a “digital fingerprints” database. When a user uploads any Images, the tool would analize that image and checks the database of pornographic images for any matches. If it finds one, then that image is not uploaded to their servers.

Microsoft have already implemented PhotoDNA technology in their Bing search engine and SkyDrive online storage service, and claims that they where able to detect more than thousands of such inappropriate and illegal images. With the PhotoDNA implementation, Facebook hopes that they would be able to bring an end to the child pornographic issue to an extend.