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NEW YORK. — Google said yesterday it had developed new technology to block child porn from more than 100,000 unique searches, ahead of talks with British Prime Minister David Cameron who has been pushing for action on indecent images online.
Cameron hailed Google’s move as “significant progress”, even if campaigners noted it affects only a fraction of the 1.2 trillion Google searches conducted each year.
Executive chairman Eric Schmidt said more than 200 Google staff have been working on new ways to tackle the problem of child sex abuse images in the past three months.
“While society will never wholly eliminate such depravity, we should do everything in our power to protect children from harm,” Schmidt wrote in the Daily Mail newspaper.
He added: “We’ve fine-tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results.” 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.
Microsoft, which owns the Bing search engine, has also stepped up action against online child abuse in recent months and it welcomed Monday’s Internet safety summit at Cameron’s Downing Street office.
“Increased collaboration (with government and industry bodies)… is the best way to combat this vile content,” a spokesman for the technology giant said. Microsoft has developed and shared its picture detection technology which helps prevent banned images being duplicated across the web, while Google is also testing new ways to identify videos of child sex abuse. Warnings have been added to more than 13,000 search results making clear child sex abuse is illegal, Schmidt said, while both Google and Microsoft have stopped auto-complete features from offering child abuse search terms.
Online Reporter