Mr. Dualta Ó Broin:

I am happy to take it. We have media matching technology. I refer to a piece of content that is an image or a video. If we get that piece of content or image, and this is the way we would deal with child sexual abuse material, images that promote terrorism or images of violence, we can put it into this system. The term we use is that we bank the image. That prevents the re-upload of the image across our services.

The Deputy mentioned a previous case where we would have used this technology. Once we became aware of the image, we banked it and made sure that image could not be re-uploaded. If there is another image taken from a slightly different perspective, that will not be caught by that. We would need to identify that image and start the process again of removing it and ensuring that it cannot be re-uploaded to the system.

Across industry we talk about the database of hashes. These are images which have been banked and a specific fingerprint or hash has been added to the image. Across industry that ensures that images cannot be re-uploaded. We use that in child exploitation.