Excerpt from PC & Tech Authority article.
A Pennsylvania man has been charged with possessing and distributing images of child sexual abuse, following a tip-off from Microsoft.
The suspect, named as 20-year-old Tyler James Hoffman, is alleged to have uploaded the offending photos to the company’s OneDrive cloud storage service via his Microsoft Live email account on his smartphone.
According to the police report, which was filed with the Monroe County Court last week, Microsoft detected in April that an image of child abuse had been uploaded to OneDrive. The company then contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which informed the police.
It was discovered the email address was linked to Hoffman’s Facebook address which, combined with an IP address trace, led to his arrest.
The revelation follows news earlier this week that a tip-off from Google regarding child abuse images being stored in Gmail had also led to an arrest.
Read the entire article here.
1. I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse that destroyed my ability to become a fully functioning adult and still harms my ability to function well to this day!
2 Pornography was a huge part of my abuse.
3. I have been tempted by the ease of accessible porn and have protected myself by installing my own monitor and refusing to EVER use Google search because the Google company makes over 75% of its income through its porn searches!!
4. I find this so hypocritically ironic that Google would help catch someone for finding stuff that Google allows to be found on its search engines and makes $$$ from!
5. I am glad the young man was caught and hopefully stopped. He is only 20 though, so a bunch of questions come to mind: Was he really a pedophile or is he just barely an adult and the porn he was saving was of younger people who are (and should be) children but are really just young teens who are caught up in the whole sexploitation of our sexting society and thus not that much younger than him? Was he just as they say, “bi-curious?” that is, he was tempted into the porn by the ease of accessibility, (sometimes certain topics it just appears on the Google search) great variety, and his age (men who are scientifically more easily stimulated sexually by visual images and who reach their biological sexual peak around age 18) and thus had all kinds of different genres of porn and the child porn was just part of the his total stash?
5. Is it fair of any online storage place in this nation where we supposedly have a constitutional “Right to Privacy” to have spied on his storage and turned him over or were his constitutional rights violated and those of us who are outraged (rightly) at his sins and crimes don’t care by what means he was caught?
6. If his rights were violated how can any of us hope to have any freedom or safety when we go down this slippery slope?
7. I use the term, “slippery slope” very consciously as when the US Supreme Court found that the constitution gave us the right to privacy it did so as it determined that that right allowed women to kill their unborn babies. This put us on a slippery slope to tolerating all sorts of other crimes. How very, very hypocritical of our society to still cling to this “right” to kill, Google’s right to make $$$ off of porn while at the same time denying this young man’s right to find that porn on Google and store it on the cloud in private!
God help me if I am giving him a defense argument but I have to wonder if this young man and many more like him hasn’t been made into a monster by the very society who is punishing him and has nothing to offer to help him (the school system? they promote porn right in the class room!) either now or before it got this far.
I predict the “solution” will not be to find ways to help him but to find ways to legalize child pornography and make pedophilia another “lifestyle choice” or simply the way he was born or even “God made me this way!”
Perhaps Microsoft and Google aren’t so dumb for turning him in….they will reap the profits when the laws change and/or they will keep people from knowing how much they profit from porn and LOOK like they are doing a good thing so that folks who are trying to help will ignore Google’s egregious sins and keep helping their business grow.