Finally, a major shift in company policies have allowed social networking sites and internet companies to help weed out unwanted and predatory behavior in order to protect the most vulnerable group in society: the children.
Google and other companies like Facebook and Microsoft just went a step further by voluntarily policing their services, including search and email, for child pornographic materials. The companies use algorithms to test whether the digital information encoded in images matches against the child pornography database at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
As a result, police authorities in Texas recently arrested 41-year-old John Henry Skillern after he allegedly sent an email to a friend containing child pornography. The tipster that blew Skillern's cover? Google.
The search giant alerted local law enforcement after detecting the allegedly illicit images in Skillern's Gmail account, part of the company's ongoing effort to root out child porn online. In doing so, it offered a glimpse of the vast power it wields over its users.
Federal law requires that Google and other tech companies report instances of child porn discovered on their services to the NCMEC, a nonprofit group that maintains a database of URLs and file information associated with known child pornography.
Google emphasizes that it only uses this email-scanning technology to detect these kinds of files, "not email content that could be associated with general criminal activity (for example using email to plot a burglary)." Translation: if you're Gchatting with a friend about buying marijuana, Google doesn't want you to worry about being turned in.
Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called Google's child-porn-detection system "a targeted, narrow way to get at the problem." But he warned of the potential dangers involved in allowing services like Google or Facebook to police their users.
Ryan Calo, a tech policy expert at the University of Washington School of Law, said that if Google "decided to take it upon themselves to police other things, they could do it and it wouldn't violate the terms of service or the Fourth Amendment," which bans unreasonable searches of private citizens. You invite Google to look in on your communications by signing up for its services.
As for the company's assurances that it doesn't police user accounts for evidence of illegal activity beyond child pornography, Calo said that promise "needs to go into the terms of service for it to matter."
The concerns about this kind of corporate surveillance aren't abstract. Earlier this year, Microsoft admitted in federal court documents that it forced its way into a blogger's Hotmail account to track down a leak of proprietary software.
Google and other companies like Facebook and Microsoft just went a step further by voluntarily policing their services, including search and email, for child pornographic materials. The companies use algorithms to test whether the digital information encoded in images matches against the child pornography database at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
As a result, police authorities in Texas recently arrested 41-year-old John Henry Skillern after he allegedly sent an email to a friend containing child pornography. The tipster that blew Skillern's cover? Google.
The search giant alerted local law enforcement after detecting the allegedly illicit images in Skillern's Gmail account, part of the company's ongoing effort to root out child porn online. In doing so, it offered a glimpse of the vast power it wields over its users.
Federal law requires that Google and other tech companies report instances of child porn discovered on their services to the NCMEC, a nonprofit group that maintains a database of URLs and file information associated with known child pornography.
Google emphasizes that it only uses this email-scanning technology to detect these kinds of files, "not email content that could be associated with general criminal activity (for example using email to plot a burglary)." Translation: if you're Gchatting with a friend about buying marijuana, Google doesn't want you to worry about being turned in.
Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called Google's child-porn-detection system "a targeted, narrow way to get at the problem." But he warned of the potential dangers involved in allowing services like Google or Facebook to police their users.
Ryan Calo, a tech policy expert at the University of Washington School of Law, said that if Google "decided to take it upon themselves to police other things, they could do it and it wouldn't violate the terms of service or the Fourth Amendment," which bans unreasonable searches of private citizens. You invite Google to look in on your communications by signing up for its services.
As for the company's assurances that it doesn't police user accounts for evidence of illegal activity beyond child pornography, Calo said that promise "needs to go into the terms of service for it to matter."
The concerns about this kind of corporate surveillance aren't abstract. Earlier this year, Microsoft admitted in federal court documents that it forced its way into a blogger's Hotmail account to track down a leak of proprietary software.
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