Google Inc (GOOG) Ponies Up $5M to Fight Online Child Exploitation

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) has been about an open and transparent Internet so that billions of people on the planet can intercommunicate with each other and share information and experiences without borders. When it comes to censorship, Google has been pushing for freer Internet experiences for users in several authoritarian countries and seems to be on the front lines pretty often when it comes to free expression and free sharing of ideas for the benefit of all. However, every now and then, Google also shows it has limits to free expression, and it is willing – at least on a modest scale – to put its money where its mouth is.

Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) this week announced a grant program where it will give $5 million to a campaign to fight the global epidemic of child exploitation line. This problem generally takes the form of graphic and/or disturbing images of child pron, child abuse or some other form of illegal exploitation of minors. While this has been aggressively tackled in the U.S. the problem continues to grow, and it has especially grown in foreign countries, where it is estimated that more than half of these illegal images and videos  posted on the Internet now originate from outside the U.S.

As part of a continuing effort to stamp out this problem, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) is committing $5 million to a Child Protection Technology Fund while also creating a special informational database for law-enforcement and other organizations to help track and delete these images from the Internet while also tracking down the offenders and prosecuting them. Google announced it has earmarked $5 million of the grant money to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the U.K.’s Internet Watch Foundation for their work in tracking down these children and prosecuting the offenders.

Google has developed a special ID program for these types of offensive and illegal images, giving each image a special ID number that is then part of its database o f images, and Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) can use the information from the ID to find the source of the image or video upload.

“Google has been working on fighting child exploitation since as early as 2006 when we joined the Technology Coalition, teaming up with other tech industry companies to develop technical solutions,” said Jacqueline Fuller of Google Giving. “Since then, we’ve been providing software and hardware to helping organizations all around the world to fight child abuse images on the web and help locate missing children.”

What are your thoughts about this initiative? Send us your feedback aout Google inc (NASDAQ:GOOG0 and this campaign in the comments section below.

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