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

I'm not entirely happy about this.

[SuricouRaven]

The IWB is a well-intentioned organisation, but they have no accountability whatsoever. They publish a list of links they claim are child abuse imagery, and ISPs block what's on the list - but the list, for obvious reasons, is super-secret. The processes by which the list is generated is also secret - even those who are put on the list are not informed that they are now on the list. Some (not all) ISPs actively try to prevent those who are censored from finding out by spoofing 404 error page rather than explaining that a deliberate block is in place - they certainly aren't going to contact the site operator. Even if someone wrongly blocked finds out (as happened with Wikipedia only because the block process inadvertently broke the site) there is no appeals process in place. That's a lot of power for an unaccountable and opaque organisation.

Re:I'm not entirely happy about this.

[EmeraldBot]

The IWB is a well-intentioned organisation, but they have no accountability whatsoever. They publish a list of links they claim are child abuse imagery, and ISPs block what's on the list - but the list, for obvious reasons, is super-secret. The processes by which the list is generated is also secret - even those who are put on the list are not informed that they are now on the list. Some (not all) ISPs actively try to prevent those who are censored from finding out by spoofing 404 error page rather than explaining that a deliberate block is in place - they certainly aren't going to contact the site operator. Even if someone wrongly blocked finds out (as happened with Wikipedia only because the block process inadvertently broke the site) there is no appeals process in place. That's a lot of power for an unaccountable and opaque organisation.

This is my primary concern as well. Child pornography is something that should be prevented, but people are going overboard with this - it's in the same vein as the war on terrorism. Child pornography is definitely despicable, but most of the efforts against it are either extremely creepy - such as this, handing over power to an almost completely unknown organization - or evoke incredible amounts of self-righteousness, especially when people start accusing each other of this crime without any proof. Between the overreach of trying to stop, it's hard to say you support, especially when the countries most against it consume almost all of it.

Furthermore, the approach we use today is fundamentally flawed. Currently, we try to block all images of it, but we can only target those existence that we know of - and even then, it's trivial to add an extra byte here and there to through of the checksumming. This creates a drive to make more of it, which more people get, before that too gets blocked. It's very profitable for these businesses and only encourages the cycle, so with all these programs in effect we're making the problem worse and worse. Most shockingly of all, when you legalize child porn, rates of it actually go down, and sex abuse goes much farther down. Given what we know about ancient societies, where children also engaged in sex and didn't show any signs of being traumatized, it's a really hard issue to grasp, because all of the morals we grew up with are being disproved by numbers. 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.

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: 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!

This kind of technology will never be misused

[Required Snark]

1984 Winston Smith

Winston Smith works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line. This involves revising newspaper articles and doctoring photographs—mostly to remove "unpersons," people who have fallen foul of the party.

Orwell couldn't conceive that Winston would be automated out of a job. That may be the only part he got wrong.

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.