Google’s founding mission is to “organize the world’s information.” But there’s some disgusting data that the tech giant will spend millions to scrub off the web.
Over the weekend, Google announced that it has been creating a database tagging child pornography on the Internet in an effort to eradicate images of child abuse entirely from the web. The company plans to spend $5 million to fight child pornography online, according to a blog post.
Google has been involved in fighting child exploitation since 2006, and has been using a special type of tagging technology called “hashing” to find child pornography since 2008. Hashing gives each image a unique ID that allows Google’s computers to find duplicate images without any people having to look at the images again.
Now, even Google’s rivals will be able to use the company’s technology.
“Recently, we’ve started working to incorporate encrypted ‘fingerprints’ of child sexual abuse images into a cross-industry database,” wrote Jacquelline Fuller, director of Google Giving. “This will enable companies, law enforcement and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing these images, and to take action against the criminals.”
Other tech companies, like Facebook and Microsoft, have been working with the National Center For Missing And Exploited Children (NCMEC) over the years to find and eradicate child pornography. Microsoft worked with Dartmouth College to create PhotoDNA technology, which has helped find and remove some of the worst images of child sexual abuse from the Internet since 2009. Facebook and Microsoft use PhotoDNA to find and remove these images from their servers.
This announcement comes just days after British Prime Minister David Cameron announced that he was “not satisfied that internet companies do enough” to fight child pornography, the British newspaper The Telegraph reported. Google has also said it created a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund which will help developers create better tools to fight online child exploitation.
As Google points out, the problem of child porn online is only growing. The NCMEC reports that the volume of such pornographic images has grown fourfold between 2007 and 2011.
