14 DAY TRIAL // Google only watches out for child abuse content as it scans your emails, the company said following the controversy surrounding its decision to tip off the police regarding one of its Gmail users and the content he was sharing over the email service.
This isn’t the first time the company has done this, though. According to a statement Google issued for Business Insider, the company works to actively remove illegal imagery from its services, including Search and Gmail, and immediately reports abuse to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The evidence, it says, is regularly used to convict criminals.
“Each child sexual abuse image is given a unique digital fingerprint which enables our systems to identify those pictures, including in Gmail,” Google’s spokesperson said, clearing things up about how the discovery was made.
Furthermore, the company only uses the technology to identify child abuse imagery, not other email content that may be associated with criminal activity, such as plotting a burglary over email or anything else that’s not really within the bounds of the law.
Google has been working for years with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, putting together a database of child abuse pictures. Each one was given a “hash,” as it is known in the tech world, which is basically a fingerprint. The company’s scanning system looks for those fingerprints when it scours the Internet and Gmail. Google is legally obligated to report any such discoveries within its systems.
Since this was something that many people were concerned about, you should know that saving cute pics of your baby frolicking naked on the beach, as any other kids do, and sending them to your close family or friends won’t get you in jail because the pictures aren’t in the database.
Even so, some were concerned that Google might start looking for criminal activity within people’s emails. While Google could certainly do this because it has enough tools for the job (as do many other companies), it doesn’t seem to be the company’s desire to become the police of the Internet because, of course, that would just mean people would quit its services in droves.
In fact, the only thing Google seems to be adamant about when it comes to criminal activities is fighting against child abuse, which is admirable and no one can deny that its work is highly important in this area.