Google Launches New Child Protection Software

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Behold Google bathed in the shining light of Concerned Corporate Citizen, an unfamiliar role for that crew. After the China debacle, the fixers at Google have surely been looking for a play that would rack up good corporate citizenry and community involvement points.

Since few peaks loom larger on the current landscape than child protection, both on and offline, today's announcement could be key to an image rehabilitation.

Google engineers have adapted a software program to help track child sex predators and search for patterns in images of abuse on the web.

The program, originally developed to block copyrighted videos on the company's YouTube division, uses pattern recognition to enable analysts to sort and identify files containing child sex abuse.

Google says its aim in teaming up with the Technology Coalition Against Child Pornography is to develop solutions that would make it harder for people to use the web to exploit children or traffic in child pornography. The buffing this will give the company's image isn't lost on its employees.

"You always hope that your work will eventually be used to do some good in the world, and this was an amazing chance to make that hope real," Google research scientist Shumeet Baluja told the BBC.

Google has created the technology for the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Since 2002 the NCMEC has pored over 13 million child sex abuse images and videos in an effort to help police identify and rescue children from harm, viewing five million pictures last year alone.

Google says the new tools will enable the centre's analysts to search their systems more quickly and easily as they try to sort and identify files that contain images of child sex abuse victims. The program uses pattern recognition and will work even if the pattern has been modified. This will allow investigators to extrapolate possible locations from identifying patterns such as a calendar on the wall or a t-shirt logo, increasing the chances of busting a child predator.

Google engineers and scientists were able to work on the project on what the company calls "20% time", which allows all employees to dedicate that amount of time to projects they initiate.These projects usually benefit bottom lines or end users, but in this case the benefit could be to thousands of children.

Here's to Google for reminding us that In a mutable, volatile, contrary world, sometime the right thing happens for the wrong reasons and you take your positives where you find them.