Google Technology to Combat Child Pornography

The San Jose Mercury News did an interesting feature today on some new Google technology that is being used to fight child pornography. The same technology that the company utilizes to block copyrighted videos on YouTube has now been employed to help track down predators online.

This innovative project comes out of the company’s infamous “20% percent time”, which Google encourages its employees to use to work on projects of their own creation and choosing. Four software engineers at Google collaborated to adapt the YouTube software to search for patterns in child pornography found online.

Working with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), Google has been applying video fingerprinting technology to help the NCMEC automate and streamline the way child protection workers sift through millions of pornographic images to identify victims of abuse. The team of four engineers have been working with federal agencies and the NCMEC for more than a year to help create software to automate the process of looking through the more than 13 million images. Previously analysts at the center had to review these images manually, which sounds like quite the daunting task.

The technology utilizes pattern recognition, and will work even if the pattern has been modified, including being cropped or changed from color to black and white. If analysts are able to identify a pattern, they will have a much better chance of finding the young victim and catching the suspect.