Google Combats Child Porn

Internet search giant Google intends to do their bit in the fight against child pornography online, and here is an excerpt from a post on Google’s official blog on the matter. “Since 2008, we’ve used ‘hashing’ technology to tag known child sexual abuse images, allowing us to identify duplicate images which may exist elsewhere. Each offending image in effect gets a unique ID that our computers can recognize without humans having to view them again. Recently, we’ve started working to incorporate encrypted ‘fingerprints’ of child sexual abuse images into a cross-industry database. This will enable companies, law enforcement and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing these images, and to take action against the criminals.”

Apart from that, Google has also invested approximately $5 million in funding so that it will assist in curbing the abuse as well as exploitation of children. Selected amounts of the funds have been earmarked for different related charities and organizations, where a donation of around $1.5 million have been made to the Internet Watch Foundation, with around $1 million to the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Apart from that, Google will also make use of approximately $2 million to give birth to their own Child Protection Technology Fund which will support the creation of new software and tools in the seemingly never ending fight against child pornography. What do you think is the best “weapon” in this particular battle?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Google, porn