Child Porn has Enemy on the Internet

The computer age surrounds us each and every day. The days of getting important information from textbooks and encyclopedias has long been replaced with search engines like Google and Bing ‑ which are always right at our fingertips. With the internet, parents know that there is a lot of unsuitable content out there that their children can readily access and that is why Google has decided to take a stand to help wipe out some very serious content – child porn.

In order to help eliminate the problem, Google recently announced that it is going to be spending $5 million in an effort to wipe out photos of child sexual abuse from the Internet, as well as another $2 million to research on more ways to find images and report and eradicate them. The director of Google Giving, Jacqueline Fuller, has strong beliefs on the matter.

“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.”

Google is also creating the Child Protection Technology Fund to develop more efficient ways to fight child porn, and recently they began using “fingerprinting” of child sex-abuse images.

“We’re in the business of making information widely available, but there’s certain ‘information’ that should never be created or found,” Fuller wrote on her blog which was reported by CNN. “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.”

Forbes is reporting that along with Google, Microsoft is also in the mix to help curb child porn. Microsoft developed a “photo DNA” which can match newly-uncovered images to other images, regardless of whether or not they were modified. Also, Facebook uses technology to identify child porn that might be posted to its site, and once it is found it is removed. Facebook also turns over the content to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.