It's en ease to bag out the behemoth that is Google, outwardly the company looks like a money making machine - without a huge social conscience - Scratch the surface a little however, and your glimmered by small signs of hope. There's a bunch of cool stuff coming out of Google's X-Labs, Project Loony's superneat wifi via balloon power. Google Culture dictates that the company has a social conscience, keeping up with that ethos is often harder than simply creating the coolest business in the galaxy.
In it's latest effort to set-things-right, Google is doing what it does best, it's creating an image database to help law enforcement control the traffic of offensive images and remove child pornography from the web. Indeed, it's a no-brainer, Google's mission statement outlines the company's intention to 'organize the worlds information' and mapping a world of depravity in order to be rid of it, something the company is exemplary at.
As well as a clever new algorithm designed to hunt down illegal child pornography, the behemoth has bequeathed tens of millions of dollars to help not-for-profits around the globe keep up the good fight. £1million/$AU1.65 million has been thrown at UK internet watchdog IWF - Internet Watch Foundation - to help boost it's surveillance, and a further £1.25 million/$AU2 million to setup a fund available for software developers to produce new tools to help fight child pornography.
Not that we're cynical, but, the last four weeks have seen Google ganged up-on by big voices in the UK, including British MPs, for what many perceive as the company's reluctance to crack down on child internet pornography.
While we'd love to sing Google's praise, we are left wondering why that hadn't done this sooner? Now that Google has announced plans to setup an online database of offensive images, you can expect that the war will escelate quickly. The ethos of the plan is to enable law enforcement agencies, not-for-profits and private companies to detect and remove offensive content more easily :: Read the full article »»»»
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