NEW YORK, NY (June 17, 2010) – Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today announced the creation of a database that will be used by social networking sites to keep child pornography off the Internet. This groundbreaking initiative is based on a database of hash values, which are the equivalent of digital fingerprints. Each image of child pornography has this digital fingerprint. The Attorney General’s Office has collected more than 8,000 such fingerprints as a result of Internet safety investigations. The database can be used as a net, finding an offending picture through the fingerprint, catching that picture, and stopping it from ending up on a site. Facebook and MySpace have agreed to use Attorney General Cuomo’s database to block any attempt to share these images on their social networks. The Attorney General also sent letters to 13 other social networking companies and peer-to-peer sites urging them to use the database.