Google has big plans to make child pornography inaccessible

Google has announced that it will dedicate $5 million towards fighting online child pornography through funds and the development of new technology that will help law enforcement agencies ’track’ users who are sharing child sexual abuse images online.

The company which said that it had been active in this space since 2006, joins other big tech companies such as Microsoft and who are also actively taking measures to curb the sharing and spread of images and videos of children being sexually abused.

In a blog post detailing the measures Google said,

“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. Today we’ve also announced a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to encourage the development of ever more effective tools.”

It is also supporting a number of organisations such as theNational Center for Missing & Exploited Children who work to curb the sexual abuse of minors online.

The company added that it was making efforts to strengthen sharing of such data across various agencies in different countries, to help find a ‘global solution’ to the problem:

“Child sexual exploitation is a global problem that needs a global solution. More than half of the images and videos reported to NCMEC are from outside of the U.S. With this in mind, we need to sustain and encourage borderless communication between organizations fighting this problem on the ground”

In a blog post for Forbes , Larry Magjid, who serves on the board of directors of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children welcomed the move, saying “The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC’s) Cybertipline received 17.3 million images and videos of suspected child abuse in 2011 which is four times more than what their Exploited Children’s Division (ECD) saw in 2007. These are images of real children being victimized not only when the images are captured but every time they are distributed and viewed.”

Concerned users who want to be a part of this effort can also report images to the National Centre for Missing & Exploited Children or even the Internet Watch Foundation .

In India, Child sexual abuse is covered under section 67(B) of the Information Technology Act 2008 . The act says that anyone found guilty of the offence,“shall be punished on first conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years and with a fine which may extend to ten lakh rupees and in the event ofsecond or subsequent conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to seven years and also with fine which may extend to ten lakh rupees”

Despite the legal protection afforded by this act however, there is no real confluence of technology companies working together to track thedistributionof such images in India. Therefore an effort like that of Google, which can aid agencies worldwide and regardless of boundary is a huge boon to the fight against online child abuse.