Technology firms under increasing pressure to act after steep rise in reports of extreme images online Amazon is top of a "hotlist of targets" drawn up by the leading internet child abuse watchdog in a fresh attempt to tackle what is says is a steep rise in reports of extreme images. Reports of pictures showing abuse of children under 10 have risen by almost a third in the past year. The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which polices child sexual abuse material, said it had seen a tenfold increase in reports to its hotline about graphic images on third-party pages hosted on computer hardware provided by the retail giant.
Websites using Amazon Web Services' online storage facilities were used to distribute at least 372 unlawful abuse pictures of children in the first half of this year, according to the IWF. A third of these images were categorised as "the worst of the worst" showing rape and torture. Amazon is one of a number of leading technology firms including Apple and the blogging site Tumblr, being targeted by the watchdog as part of a renewed assault on paedophilic images online. But the sites complained of are independent of Amazon, simply paying for website hosting services it provides.
In the reports of pictures showing abuse of children under 10 have risen by almost a third in the past year, and alerts about the most graphic material have increased by 61%. Web firms have been under pressure to do more to tackle the problem since the culture secretary, Maria Miller, demanded a fundamental change in the way the industry approached child abuse images after Bridger was jailed. The IWF is to warn Amazon, Apple, Samsung and other web firms, including the blogging platform Tumblr and file-hosting service Dropbox, that their products are being used to share unlawful pictures of child sexual abuse. For some like Amazon, Dropbox and imgur, their services are being abused by those who wish to distribute images of children being sexually abused, She added.
Many major internet firms, such as Google and Facebook, are members of the Cambridgeshire-based IWF, but others, including Amazon, Apple and Samsung , are not. It has a corporate social responsibility to act because their products were being abused "to create and distribute criminal images."