Google has plans for an international project that aims to eliminate images of child sexual assault on the web and put criminals behind bars.
For Americans, the freedom of speech is our #1 right as a citizen; the internet has made that a value to be treasured across the world. Some things, however, cross the line from speech into action and abuse, like child pornography.
“The Internet has been a tremendous force for good—increasing access to information, improving people’s ability to communicate and driving economic growth,” wrote Jacquelline Fuller, director of Google Giving on the official Google blog. “But like the physical world, there are dark corners on the web where criminal behavior exists.”
For this reason, Google is working with law enforcement officials and other technology groups across the globe and has created a $2-million Child Protection Technology Fund to develop a database of encrypted child pornography images that will allow law enforcement to track, block, and arrest criminals in possession of them.
John Carr, a government adviser on child internet safety, said, “This is an important moment. It should focus the minds of other industry leaders in relation to how they are going to join the fight. Google [has] stepped up. No one can argue about that. In all my time working in this space no company has ever devoted anything like this level of resources to working with civil society organisations to attack online child abuse images.”
The industry-wide database is expected to be functional within one year. The system will work by giving each image a digital “fingerprint.”
Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond explains how the system will work:
Since 2008, we have 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 fingerprint that our computers can recognize without humans having to view them again. Recently, we have started working to incorporate these fingerprints into a cross-industry database. This will enable companies, law enforcement, and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing child abuse images.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which Google and others in a Technology Coalition against child pornography have worked closely with, received 17.3 million images and videos of suspected child abuse in 2011 on their tip line—four times as many as they received in 2007.
“Child sexual exploitation is a global problem that needs a global solution,” wrote Fuller.
More than half of the images and videos sent to NCMEC for analysis are found to have been uploaded to U.S. servers from outside the country. With this in mind, we need to sustain and encourage borderless communication between organizations fighting this problem on the ground. […]
We’re in the business of making information widely available, but there’s certain “information” that should never be created or found. We can do a lot to ensure it’s not available online—and that when people try to share this disgusting content they are caught and prosecuted.
Photo: FBI
Good Idea but I fear it won’t stop at child porn.