14 DAY TRIAL // British authorities may be happy Google and Microsoft have been working together to locate keywords that link up to child abuse content, but the new measures may not be that useful after all.
“The first thing to remember is that Google is the search engine, not the Internet. The only thing that they are going to be able to block is things coming up in their search; they can’t take it down from the Internet,” said Dr. Joss Wright from the Oxford University, The Telegraph reports.
The doctor who recently wrote a report on cybercrime for the United Nations, said paedophiles tend to use encrypted systems to share such content rather than Google it.
“I am not convinced it is going to have a huge impact,” she said, contradicting a cheerful statement made by David Cameron who said there had already been a 20 percent drop in people trying to find illegal content.
The British prime minister is getting ready to announce a joint US and British task force to track those who share such content online.
One of the measures to fight off child pornography is to get search engines on board for blocking a bunch of key terms, with Google locating about 100,000. The problem with the measure is that the content is no longer being featured on Google or Bing search results, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone off the Internet.
“It is an endless spiral and it is an ongoing process of change. The trouble really comes when the amount things you have to block to be up to date means you start to ban innocuous things. If paedophiles start referring to abuse images as cake you can’t block cake from Internet searches,” Dr. Wright said, pointing to the holes in the plan built up by the authorities.