Google is known for providing funds to different charities but it has also earned a good repute when it comes to protecting the society by taking various initiatives. Recently the search engine giant was appreciated by children protection organisations for two of its initiatives which the multinational corporation has taken to remove teen pornography from the web, according to the news report from the UK’s The Telegraph. The first initiative that Google has taken is the formation of an image-flagging database, which can be easily accessed by all technology companies, so if any child sexual abuse image is discovered it could be blocked from the web. The second initiative of Google in this regard is that the company has made a $2 million fund available to software developers in order to develop tools that could fight against this problem.
“John Carr, a government adviser on child internet safety, said: “Google have 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.”
Susie Hargreaves, chief executive officer of the Internet Watch Foundation, which is partly-funded by Google, said: “This announcement is inspiring for those who are at the forefront of tackling child sexual abuse content. We know that the best way to tackle what is some of the most horrific content online is by working with others from all over the world to combat this on a global platform.” …”
IWF and several other organizations like it search for teen sexual abusive images and report them. However, there is no standard procedure for the industry that will enable other companies to identify such images and report it to Google so that they take quick action to block these images from search result. It is expected that Google will be able to have the database in place within a year, which can be accessed by any law enforcement agency, search engine, ISP to search and block abusive images.
“David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said: “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.””
Source: 9to5Google
Photo: Blogs.Telegraph
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