Battling Child Pornography: Google Blocks 100 000 Searches

Lazarus Sauti

Eric Schmidt, Google boss said that the technology giant had developed new technology that makes it harder to find child sexual abuse images on the web.

Schmidt, writing in British newspaper the Daily Mail, also said more than 100,000 searches would no longer feature such material in their results.

He said the restrictions will initially apply to English-speaking countries but will be expanded to the rest of the world and 158 other languages within six months.

The announcement comes ahead of Monday’s Internet Safety Summit at Prime Minister David Cameron’s Downing Street office, where Google and Microsoft will be joined by other Internet firms.

In July, Cameron threatened to introduce legislation to block access to illegal images if search engines failed in their ‘moral duty’ to do it voluntarily.

Cameron said ahead of the summit, “Since then, we have worked closely with both Google and Microsoft and they have made significant progress in preventing child abuse content from being returned.”

He also said the threat of legislation remained.

“With the progress that has been made in four months, I believe we are heading in right direction but no one should be in doubt that there is a red line.

“If more is not 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,” he said.

On eliminating the problem, Schmidt wrote, “While society will never wholly eliminate such depravity, we should do everything in our power to protect children from harm.”

He added: “In the last three months, Google had put more than 200 staff working on developing new technology to tackle the problem. We have fine tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.”

However, some experts warned that the reforms will not stop paedophiles sharing images on the Internet.

Jim Gamble, former head of the police-linked Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre puts it thus: “They do not go on to Google to search for images. They go on to the dark corners of the Internet on peer-to-peer websites.”