As reported at GameSHOUT.

Google has taken an aggressive approach in fighting child abuse and tracking predators using YouTube.

Google Inc. Is using its clout to fight child abuse by adapting a new program that will find copyright videos on YouTube to help identify patterns in child abuse images that will then be used to track predators. This is the same work that was done for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or the NCMEC. Google said that this was done on the company’s “20 percent time” whereby an employee is allowed to give one fifth of their time to projects they start for good causes.

One problem with this program though is the sheer amount of data involved. In the last six years, NCMEC had to sort through nearly 13 million images and videos of child abuse; five million of those were in 2007 alone. Google stated that it has tools that will speed up the process a great deal.

Google said in a blog post that its tools will allow analysts to be able to more quickly search the NCMEC database and identify files that contain images of child pornography. Google further has a video tool that will be able to streamline the analysis of video snippets and identify it as child porn. I think that we can all agree that these tools will help Google do a great good in an area that needs all the help it can get.

[via GameSHOUT]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Google Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.