Google Helps Fight Child Porn

The company has adapted a program used to find copyright videos on YouTube to help identify patterns in child abuse images and track predators.

Google might have its critics from time to time, but company employees can also do a lot of good. A group of them have taken a program originally developed totrack copyrighted videos posted on YouTube without permission and adapted it in order to search for patterns in abuse images online and also track child predators.   The work has been done forthe National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and was done on the company’s “20% time,” under which employees are allowedto give one-fifth of their time to projects they start, whether they’re for the company or for good causes.   The big problem for analysts has been the sheer amount of data; in the lastsix years the NCMEC has had to go through 13 million images and videos of child abuse, with five million in the last year alone. Google’s tools will greatly speed up that analysis.  Google research scientist Shumeet Baluja said in a blog posting,   “With these tools, analysts will be able to more quickly and easilysearch NCMEC’s large information systems to sort and identify files that contain images of child pornography. In addition, a new video tool we built streamlines analysts’ review of videosnippets,” and added,   "You always hope that your work will eventually be used to do some good in the world, and this was an amazing chance to make that hope real."