Comment by cameronh90

It's worth noting that integrating a CSAM hash scanner is easy to do. It took me a few hours to do the work, including testing and automatic database updates.

HOWEVER: I'm not sure how you would get access to the CSAM hash database if you're were starting a new online image hosting service.

The requirements to sign up for IWF (the defacto UK CSAM database) membership are:

- be legally registered organisations trading for more than 12 months;

- be publicly listed on their country registration database;

- have more than 2 full-time unrelated employees;

- and demonstrate they have appropriate data security systems and processes in place.

Cloudflare have a free[1] one but you have to be a Cloudflare customer.

Am I missing something, or does this make it very difficult to start up a public facing service from scratch?

[0] https://www.iwf.org.uk/membership/how-to-join/

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-csam-scanning-tool/