Google is pledging a total of $7 million, and has launched new tools, to help fight child sex abuse on the Web.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Google spending a total of $7 million to ramp up fight against child porn
- Search giant's "fingerprinting" helps find images, prosecute those who post them
- Child Protection Technology Fund will look for new tools
- Google says it will spend $5 million on an effort to wipe pictures of child sexual abuse from the Web and another $2 million to research more effective ways to find, report and eradicate the images.
"The Internet has been a
tremendous force for good -- increasing access to information, improving
people's ability to communicate and driving economic growth,"
Jacqueline Fuller, the director of Google Giving, said in a blog post. "But like the physical world, there are dark corners on the web where criminal behavior exists."
Part of the $5 million
will go to established child-protection groups that have been partnering
with Google to fight the problem. They include the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation.
The Web giant also is creating the Child Protection Technology Fund to develop more efficient ways to fight child porn.
Recently, Google has
begun using "fingerprinting" of child sex-abuse images, Fuller said. It
will help law enforcement, Web companies and advocates find and remove
the images, as well as prosecute the people who posted them, Google
says.
"We're in the business of
making information widely available, but there's certain 'information'
that should never be created or found," Fuller wrote. "We can do a lot
to ensure it's not available online -- and that when people try to share
this disgusting content they are caught and prosecuted."
Since 2008, Google has
been using technology to tag images, helping the company find them
anywhere else they may appear on the Web. Among other things, Google can
make sure images or Web pages do not appear in search results.
In 2006, the company joined Microsoft, Aol, Time, Time Warner (CNN's parent company) and others in a Technology Coalition, targeting child abuse on the Web, and has donated hardware and software to groups around the world fighting child sex abuse.
The company, which
jealously protects details on how its search algorithms and other
processes work, did not immediately respond to a message seeking more
details about how its new initiative will work and what additional
efforts may be on the way.
According to the
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the group's tip line
received 17.3 million images and videos of suspected child abuse in
2011. That was four times what the group received in 2007.