Google and Microsoft have ramped up their efforts to find child porn and to exclude related search terms from their algorithms. This may be a double edged sword, considering that non-indexation may lead to a greater veil of secrecy, but on the other hand, normal internet surfers (are child porn addicts normal surfers?) will not be able to access child pornography by simple searches on the search engines. They will have to know where to go.
The search engines claim that the new technology will be able to spot content that genuinely represents child abuse and once spotted each item would be assigned a unique digital fingerprint that will speed the detection and deletion from Google’s system.
On Sunday, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said in an article written for the Daily Mail, “We’ve fine-tuned Google search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.”
And for once, the rivals seem to be cooperating with each other, and Schmidt wrote, “Microsoft deserves a lot of credit for developing and sharing its picture detection technology.”
According to Schmidt, engineers at YouTube have also come up with new technology to spot child porn videos and the technology would be made available to other Internet companies and agencies for child protection.
According to the press in UK the joint effort of Microsoft and Google is in response to urging by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, who praised the move to detect and block child porn material by the search engines as a “really significant step forward.”
In June, Google had announced its plans to build a database of child porn images to share with law enforcement and other tech companies and charities around the world.
However, at the center of this new technology to detect child porn is Microsoft’s hashing technology which it developed for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s PhotoDNA program. The technology is used today by many companies on the Internet including Facebook.