3.3 Technical measures

🎯 What are some examples of technical measures? Can they be used independently, in lieu of other types of measures?

National policies rely, to different extents, on technical measures that should be used only in conjunction with other measures. In addition, technical measures can be either voluntary – as in many countries – or a legal requirement. For example, in some countries, ISP filtering forms part of self-regulatory measures, while in others, filtering is a mandatory requirement.

Various technical and process-based measures can combat child sexual abuse. Hotline reporting mechanisms and notice-and-takedown requests often work hand-in-hand, and are typically the first line of defence for industry players seeking to rid their services of illegal content. 

Technical measures also include maintaining victim-identification databases and preventing access to specific sites, such as Europol’s and INTERPOL’s databases that help identify victims of child sexual abuse. Hashing technology, which assigns a unique fingerprint (or hash value) to identify child sexual abuse images, has become an important tool in combatting CSAM. Other technical measures make use of data mining and analytics to assist investigations.