‘No finish line,’ but Project Arachnid celebrates 50 million images scrubbed

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This article was published 29/01/2025 (425 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A tech program that detects and flags online images and videos of child sex abuse in an effort to get the files removed from the web has been a “life raft for victims.”

The web-crawling program, dubbed Project Arachnid, was created by the Winnipeg-based non-profit Canadian Centre for Child Protection in 2017. It partners with other child protection organizations across the world.

The centre said Wednesday the program has flagged and tried to take action to scrub the internet of nearly 50 million images and videos of child sex abuse — referred to in law as child pornography — in the eight years since it began operating. Many of the files may be the same images or videos uploaded in multiple locations.

Centre director of research and analytics Jacques Marcoux said some survivors of sex abuse, who are aware the images of their torment are spreading online, have told the non-profit the program is “like a life raft for them.”

“Before they knew … our system was proactively working, with automation and at a scale, 24/7, finding the content and having it removed from the internet, a lot of these victims, they take it upon themselves to try to police and monitor and track the spread and deal with an operator who is reluctant or unwilling to take down the content,” said Marcoux.

“For them, it’s living in a constant state of torment, of anxiety.”

He said it is difficult to gauge the exact number of victims in the images that have been taken down during the project, which uses automation.

“It’s a very vast problem, and there’s no way to have eyes on all of it. Arachnid is really a response to that fact — this a tech-facilitated crime and you need to able to combat it at scale, because an army of humans based out of a charity in Winnipeg can’t keep up with the scale, even if we partner with other international groups,” said Marcoux.

“This is really an approach to bring cutting-edge technology into the fold to help augment the work that the humans that are verifying the content are doing.”

The program crawls publicly accessible URLs that have been reported to cybertip.ca, as well as places on the regular and dark web. It can process tens of thousands of images per second.

The program then automatically issues take down notices to the administrators hosting the files to scrub them, if the data matches that of other files already identified by authorities. If the images appear new, human analysts in Canada and other countries review them and “try to connect the dots,” said Marcoux, then add them into databases.

“It’s like a game of digital whack-a-mole in the wild west of the internet — it’s almost adversarial — we come up with a measure to help tackle a specific problem … and then the offender community, they learn from that and they modify their tactics to add barriers,” said Marcoux.

He called that obfuscation frustrating. “There’s no finish line.”

Marcoux said federal governments, including Canada’s, need to introduce legislation to better address the issue, including measures to ensure the content is blocked from being uploaded in the first place.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca