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
