Google adopts more aggressive strategy to filter child porn

Life

17 June 2013

Google has gone on the offensive in the fight against child pornography. The search giant has announced plans to aggregate and tag and images of child abuse gathered online and have them removed from the Internet.

According to a blog post by director of Google Giving Jacquelline Fuller, a total of $7 million will be invested in child protection comprising of a $5 million split between organisations like the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, the Internet Watch Foundation and a number of unspecified organisations in the US, UK, Europe, Canada, Australia and Latin America.

It is hoped that additional entities like search engines, law enforcement agencies and charities will pool resources by submitting their material to the database where each entry will be issued with an ID ‘hash’ meaning material can be identified without having to be viewed.

"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," wrote Fuller.

"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."

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