Christian Berg got the idea as a young Chalmers student and started developing software that could track imagery where children are sexually abused. He turned to child rights organizations and received prompt response from Childhood, which invested SEK 400,000.

world leader

Today, the company Netclean collaborates with police agencies in many countries with various technical solutions that can detect, identify and report images of child sexual abuse, both on the internet, darknet and corporate computers. Soon the technology is also available for mobile devices such as phones and tablets.

Many of the large companies in Sweden have installed the software in their employees' computers. If someone is surfing or spreading pictures of the abuse, the employer receives an alarm and is obliged to make a police report.

- Thanks to the new technology, we can highlight a problem that many companies do not believe exists. We can thus save more children, says founder Christian Berg to SVT Nyheter.

Christian Berg works with police authorities around the world. Thanks to new technological solutions, images of child sexual abuse can be detected and reported. Photo: Private

It has become increasingly easy to manufacture, disseminate and hide material with sexual abuse of children with the help of encryption and cloud services.

- Many companies today want to take their social responsibility and not risk that images of child abuse exist in their IT environments. We wish that more people in the public sector reasoned in the same way, says the company's CEO Anna Borgström.

Anna Borgström is the CEO of a Gothenburg-based company that develops software that can detect movies and images where children are subjected to sexual abuse. Photo: Private

Swedish telecom companies collaborate with the children's rights organization Ecpat, which is part of a global network of web-based hotlines. Anyone can tell about suspected sexual exploitation of children. When they are discovered, alarms go through Interpol to police in the country where the material was found. Using AI, artificial intelligence, you can now remove the images from the web and stop the spread.

- Every time an image is spread, a new abuse is made for the child. All sectors of society must work together in this, it requires a holistic approach, says Thomas Andersson, senior adviser at Ecpat.

Schools and county councils

Kungsbacka has installed software that tracks sexual abuse material on children in all municipal schools. Also in the Stockholm region, which was formerly called Stockholm County Council, 43,000 computers have been equipped with the technology.