Google Helps Police With Child Porn WebCrawler (siliconbeat.com)

The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that the Internet Watch Foundation, "an organization that works with police worldwide to remove images of child sexual abuse from the Internet, has credited Google with helping it develop a 'Web crawler' that finds child pornography." The pilot project makes it easier to identify and remove every copy of specific images online, and the group says "We look forward to the next phase of the Googler in Residence project in 2016." Last year Google also had an engineer working directly with the foundation, and the group's annual report says "This was just one part of the engineering support Google gave us in 2015." [PDF] Their report adds that the new technology "should block thousands of their illegal images from being viewed on the Internet."

Comments

Re: The "internet watch foundation" wins

[Anonymous Coward]

It always starts with taking down images of child pornography / child exploitation. I'm all for getting rid of this sort of thing but the OP does have a point. The same system could be used to filter out all identified cartoon depictions of Muhammad!

Re:I'm not entirely happy about this.

[Linsaran]

If it weren't for the fact I'd be put on a government watchlist for the rest of my life, I might even suggest that perhaps the issue is more complex than we think.

Like almost everything, the issue IS more complex than we think. Drugs, for profit prisons, whether or not 'hitting your kids' is acceptable. You name a topic and I'm sure I can come up with a half dozen different sides to it. As for the government watch lists, I'm sure we're both on a couple dozen already. There's just the matter of 'is this an issue people care about right now'.

Re:But they do, so do you

[darkonc]

While I have no problem with Google nailing pedos on the net, the problem I have with them searching through private images to do so is that it opens up a slippery slope for searching for other content that certain people might find 'subversive'... like being a Bernie supporter, or wanting to turn in certain kinds of corruption.

The privacy of private information that Google has access to needs to remain sacrosanct or there will be a huge pile of people walking away from Google.