Nearly five months after Google vowed to create an industry-wide database to banish child pornography, the Internet giant’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, has taken to the press to announce that Google has fine-tuned its algorithms to clean up results of certain queries that may be related to child sex abuse.In an article in the British newspaper Daily Mail, Schmidt wrote that the company had gone through more than 100,000 search queries that could’ve had connection to sex abuse of children. Schmidt wrote that last week alone, 348 people were arrested in Canada in one of the largest child sex investigations ever and over 386 young kids were rescued. While Google has been actively removing child sex imagery from its services, alerting authorities all the time, Schmidt points out to a speech made by British Prime Minister David Cameron who says there’s always more that can be done to stop this.
Google Search smartens up (Image credit: Getty Images)
Internet companies like Google and Microsoft are working to help law enforcement to stop pedophiles. While no algorithm is perfect, says Schmidt, and Google cannot prevent pedophiles from adding new images from time to time, it has managed to clean up results for 100,000 queries that could be directed to results and imagery of child abuse. These changes are rolling out soon for more than 150 languages for a truly global impact. More than 13,000 queries on Google will now throw up warnings on top of the results – both from the company and charities. These will not just warn users that child sex abuse is illegal, it also offers advice on where to go in order to seek help. Schmidt wrote that since it is difficult for computers to differentiate between innocent images of children and those involving abuse, a person mans the desk at all time, giving unique digital fingerprints to each of these illegal images. So when these images appear online again, they’re easily identified and removed. “Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for developing and sharing its picture detection technology,” Schmidt writes. YouTube too is developing a new technology to track videos involving abuse. The technology is being tested internally at Google and will be made available to other Internet companies and child safety organisations next year. Google is also planning to second computer engineers to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) in Britain and the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). It also intends to fund internships for other engineers in these organisations in order to help them weed out child sex abuse from the Internet.
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