Skip to main content

Microsoft and Google make it harder to find child porn online

google area 21 hq
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Google and Microsoft are using their powers for good, making it more difficult to find child pornography videos and photos online.

The tech giants are tweaking their search algorithms to ensure that roughly 100,000 search terms fail to turn up child porn-related content, like pics and clips. These measures will first apply to countries that speak English, however, over the next six months, this will apply to over 150 languages. Eventually, each flagged photo will have its own digital fingerprint. This comes after Microsoft announced its new Cybercrime Center.

Google exec Eric Schmidt commented on the measures in an article he wrote for Daily Mail, a British publication.

“We’ve listened, and in the last three months put more than 200 people to work developing new, state-of-the-art technology to tackle the problem.”

Though Schmidt cautioned that “no algorithm is perfect,” he also stated that the efforts spearheaded by Google and Microsoft to combat child pornography on the Internet “will be truly global.” Schmidt also added that Google employed YouTube to develop and create new tech that identifies child porn videos.

While he praised Microsoft’s picture detection tech, Schmidt pointed out that “paedophiles [sic] are increasingly filming their crimes,” which created a need for video ID tech.

The YouTube video identification tech is currently being tested and Schmidt hopes that Google will be able to make it to other Internet firms and organizations that combat child porn “in the new year.”

 Image credit: http://siliconangle.com

Editors' Recommendations

Konrad Krawczyk
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…
Google’s new Bard AI may be powerful enough to make ChatGPT worry — and it’s already here
A man walks past the logo of the US multinational technology company Google during the VivaTech trade fair.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, but it will soon have a formidable rival. Google has just announced that its new "experimental conversational AI service" called Bard has now entered the testing phase.

For Google, perfecting this AI model seems to be an absolute priority, and it's running out of time to do so. Luckily for Bard, it will have a certain edge over this version of ChatGPT.

Read more
Microsoft Word vs. Google Docs
A person using a laptop that displays various Microsoft Office apps.

For the last few decades, Microsoft Word has been the de facto standard for word processors across the working world. That's finally starting to shift, and it looks like one of Google's productivity apps is the heir apparent. The company's Google Docs solution (or to be specific, the integrated word processor) is cross-platform and interoperable, automatically syncs, is easily shareable, and perhaps best of all, is free.

However, Google Docs still has a long way to go before it can match all of Word's features -- Microsoft has been developing its word processor for over 30 years, after all. Will Google Docs' low barrier to entry and cross-platform functionality win out? Let's break down each word processor in terms of features and capabilities to help you determine which is best for your needs.
How does each word processing program compare?
To put it lightly, Microsoft Word has an incredible advantage over Google Docs in terms of raw technical capability. From relatively humble beginnings in the 1980s, Microsoft has added new tools and options in each successive version. Most of the essential editing tools are available in Google Docs, but users who are used to Word will find it limited.

Read more
How ChatGPT could help Microsoft dethrone Google Search
A person on the Google home page while using a MacBook Pro laptop on a desk.

Microsoft is attempting to dethrone Google as the search champion by integrating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. That’s according to a new report from The Information -- but will the gamble pay off?

ChatGPT only launched in November 2022, but it’s already been making waves among artificial intelligence researchers and the general public alike due to the unerring realism of its output. Chuck in any prompt you can think of and you’ll get back something that keenly resembles human-generated text, and people have been using it to write articles, generate code, and compose musical scores.

Read more