Internet Giant, Google, announced that it would take measures to block child pornography. The company’s chairman Eric Schmidt, writing in a recent British Daily Mail op-ed ahead of a Downing Street summit on internet pornography, says: ‘We’ve listened. We’ve fine-tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.’
The restrictions, which have been designed to apply in English-speaking countries, will be expanded to cover the rest of the world and 158 other languages in the next six months. Mr Schmidt also reveals that Google has developed breakthrough technology that will allow illegal videos to be ‘tagged’ so that all duplicate copies can be removed across the internet.
Cleaning up search: We’ve fine tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results. While no algorithm is perfect – and Google cannot prevent paedophiles adding new images to the web – these changes have cleaned up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids. As important, we will soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global.
Deterrence: We’re now showing warnings – from both Google and charities – at the top of our search results for more than 13,000 queries. These alerts make clear that child sexual abuse is illegal and offer advice on where to get help.
Detection and removal: There’s no quick technical fix when it comes to detecting child sexual abuse imagery. This is because computers can’t reliably distinguish between innocent pictures of kids at bath-time and genuine abuse. So we always need to have a person review the images. Once that is done – and we know the pictures are illegal – each image is given a unique digital fingerprint.
This enables our computers to identify those pictures whenever they appear on our systems. And Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for developing and sharing its picture detection technology.
But paedophiles are increasingly filming their crimes. So our engineers at YouTube have created a new technology to identify these videos.
We’re already testing it at Google, and in the new year we hope to make it available to other internet companies and child safety organisations.
Technical expertise: There are many organisations working to fight the sexual exploitation of kids online – and we want to ensure they have the best technical support.
So Google plans to second computer engineers to both the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) here in Britain and the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). We also plan to fund internships for other engineers at these organisations.
This will help the IWF and NCMEC stay one step ahead. The sexual abuse of children is a global challenge, and success depends on everyone working together – law enforcement, internet companies and charities.
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