Google and Microsoft are teaming up to try to rid the internet of child pornography.
Google and Microsoft have bent to political pressure in the UK – by agreeing to tweak their search engines to not only make it a little harder for sickos to find child abuse images online, but to also prevent regulatory intervention.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron said that "significant progress" had been made since the summer months when he began wrangling with web search engines and other internet players over the relative ease with which illegal content that shows children being sexually abused could be accessed.
More than 200 employees at Google have spent the past three months working on preventing child sexual abuse content from appearing in the firm's search results.
Using Microsoft picture detection technology, a unique identification mark is applied to such content, and then all copies are immediately removed from the web.Schmidt detailed how the two tech giants were using new technology to take down many images and videos of child porn from the web.
Google has also cleaned up the search results for over 100,000 web queries that were known to lead to child porn-related results.
"We will soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global," said Schmidt.
Another 13,000 search queries that are related to child porn will lead web users to online warnings saying that child sexual abuse is illegal, while offering advice on where to get help.
The move comes a week after the arrest of 348 people around the world who were connected to an international child sex abuse investigation. Of the people arrested, there were 40 teachers, six law enforcement personnel, nine pastors or priests and some doctors and nurses.
The PM said:
Both companies [Google and Microsoft] have made clear to me that they share my commitment to stop child abuse content from being available not only in the UK but across the world.
This must mean making sure that it is not possible for people to find child abuse content via search engines now or in the future.
If the search engines are unable to deliver on their commitment to prevent child abuse material being returned from search terms used by pedophiles, I will bring forward legislation that will ensure it happens.
With the progress that has been made in 4 months, I believe we are heading in right direction but no-one should be in doubt that there is a red line: if more isn’t done to stop illegal content or pathways being found when someone uses a child abuse search term, we will do what is necessary to protect our children.
