This year marks 10 years since CameraForensics was formed. To mark the occasion, we thought we’d take a look at the history behind our company, how our mission continues to evolve, the incredible network of partners that we’ve developed, as well as what our plans for the future are. Read more below:

It all started with a stolen camera

The CameraForensics you now know all started with a stolen camera. When our founder, Matt, found out that his camera had been stolen, he developed stolencamerafinder to get it back, making use of his camera’s Exif data to retrieve it. Realising that this may be used to help other people in the same situation, he began developing the site.

Bumping heads with various others on the road and eventually moving into a Bristol office space that saw him interacting with other startups daily, and a few contracts later, and Matt was working alongside Julien to improve web crawlers.

When realising this tech could help those affected by exploitation by targeting CSAM online, CameraForensics was formed.

The early years

While we now had a product that we believed in, we needed to make it known to potential users to aid them in their efforts – from going door-to-door at police stations to attending sector conferences and narrowly missing a face-to-face with the FBI. While a viable business model was needed to enable them to continue working on the project, the slowly growing team were more determined on supporting the platform as much as possible to help out victims as rapidly and as intelligently as possible.

With this focus on development prioritised, the team were now able to focus on furthering the CameraForensics mission, getting the word out, and creating national - and international – impact.

Developing technology

As the CameraForensics team and base of users have developed, so did our capabilities. With a focus on consistent R&D, our developers branched out into increasing our dark-web and Big Data expertise, expanding into cloud-based infrastructure, as well as expanding our online image database into the billions.

This also led to our team developing ExifExtractor – a free application that allows users to easily convert Exif data into a BigSearch compatible format.

Read more about how we created ExifExtractor, and how we wrote the code in a single day here.

A constantly expanding network of partners

We truly believe in our mission, and it’s infused in every aspect of our work here at CameraForensics. Over our 10 years of growth, we’ve been lucky to work with some amazing people all over the world, to form a large network of international partners.

From tech experts like Committed and Cubica to NGOs such as Global Emancipation Network, Project Arachnid, and Interpol, our family of like-minded partners are dedicated to making a positive impact through harnessing technology – combatting global threats like modern slavery, human trafficking, and child sexual exploitation daily.

We are incredibly proud of the network of partners we’ve created, and look forward to our future work with them as we continue supporting this range of worldwide causes.

Learn more about our family of like-minded partners here.

Growing challenges

However, the road hasn’t been smooth by any means. When aiding users in an ever-shifting, constantly evolving landscape, we encounter a wide range of challenges both in the political, as well as the technological, climate. From the average age of internet access continuing to decrease, and more and more countries developing greater internet capabilities such as live streaming and more, we’ve met our fair share of challenges.

A core challenge we’ve faced was in navigating a collaborative working partnership with governing bodies and Big Tech companies. While our network of partners can make a global impact, gaining the support and backing of these larger players is critical to reaching the next level of international change.

Learn more about the need for greater input from governing bodies and Big Tech in our partner blog with Project Arachnid here.

Another common challenge that we’ve faced more recently has been demonstrating the relationship between individual data privacy rights and safeguarding victims – an issue elevated by the current debate circulating Apple’s delayed rollout of their CSAM scanning tools.

To challenge fears of sacrificing individual data privacy rights, we created and shared a series of infographics such as this one, intending to share relevant information and educate the public on how their rights are being protected throughout.

The future of CameraForensics

The last ten years have been eventful here at CameraForensics HQ, but we’re more excited than ever to continue our work and furthering our mission in the future.

We know that this is a long mission, and we expect the challenges to get greater before we can overcome them. We expect the internet to continue getting easier than ever to access, bringing with it a litany of threats, but we hope that in time we can overcome these with our partners.

We’re proud of the work we do, and from the first moment we realised the impact we make while standing in a queue at the airport, to the everyday battles we win, we’re grateful for having the ability, and the team, to enact our mission.

Ultimately, we hope that in ten years CameraForensics won’t need to exist, but in the meantime, we’ll continue furthering the effort and driving positive impact.