Google teams up the the NCMEC to help combat child porn

Google has teamed up with the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to develop a program that aims to tackle the problem of child pornography online.

The internet giant first joined the NCMEC’s Technology Coalition against Child Pornography in August of 2006. Google discovered that the organisation had reviewed more than 13 million images and videos of child pornography in an effort to help federal law agencies working to rescue children. However, the methods in which they were reviewing the material was time consuming and the NCMEC was dealing with a huge amount of data.

Shumeet Baluja, a research scientist at Google, decided the NCMEC could benefit from some of the company’s organisational skills.

"One of our core strengths here at Google is our ability to manage and organize immense amounts of information — whether it’s text, image, audio, or video — and make it more useful and accessible for users. As a member of Google’s research group, I realized that NCMEC had an immediate need for some of our research-stage technology."

The software is similar to the image-recognition tools the company uses to identify copyright infringements on video sharing site, YouTube and will enable NCMEC analysts to more quickly and easily search it’s systems to sort files that contain images of victims.

Aside from that new video tools will streamline analysts’ review of video clips from files seized in child pornography cases.

"At Google, we are focused on creating innovative technology to organize information and have expertise in computer processing of images," said Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Engineering and Research at Google. "The tools we’ve built for NCMEC will allow its analysts to more efficiently and accurately manage the task of sifting through the videos and images they have collected."