Google, Microsoft Team Up to Block Child Abuse Images

Google and Microsoft had come up with a joint project of blocking online searches of child abuse images on Monday.

The two leading Internet search giants said that as much as a hundred thousand searches related to child abuse will now generate zero results and prompt warnings that the item searching for is illegal.

After Prime Minister David Cameron insisted Internet firms to take serious measures in halting access to illegal images after a couple of child abuse crimes had happened, the child porn crackdown was publicized in an Internet safety summit in London.

Cameron claimed that their country's National Crime Agency (NCA) in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is working to trace pedophiles and arrest them.

He said that the operation is "significant" but tracking down pedophiles in the "dark web" of encrypted networks is more important.

After the summit, Mr. Cameron told Reuters, "We were told that cleaning up searches couldn't be done and shouldn't be done. We're now being told by the industry that it can be done and will be done." He added that an international summit is scheduled to take place next year to follow-up on the concord confirmed on Monday.

Both companies have initiated new algorithms to prevent searches from child abuse photos. The companies have also agreed to use their technological skill to find the photos and help U.K’s Internet Watch Foundation and the United Nations’ National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for combating and solving child abuse-related matters.

Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, said that these changes would pioneer in Britain and in the next six months, it will also be introduced to the other 158 countries.

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, told Reuters that installing technology improvements to spot child abuse imagery and delete it in the process was teamwork.

However, Jim Gamble, former head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), told BBC that he did not think the steps would have great impact in protecting children from pedophiles. He said, "They don't go on to Google to search for images. They go on to the dark corners of the internet on peer-to-peer websites."

Furthermore, a number of anti-child porn advocates argued that the scheme did not go far enough and sought greater endowment to eliminate sharing child abuse images via per-to-peer networks.