Google (GOOG) and Microsoft ( MSFT) made a historic move to prevent child abuse and pornography and removed all content related to child sexual abuse from their search engine.
The action came after UK Prime Minister David Cameron appealed both major search engines to remove any content that links with child violence. Google and Microsoft accepted the request and announce that they will be deleting all terms that will lead or encourage crime against children.
Microsoft’s search engine Bing and all search associated with Yahoo will no longer have links of any child abuse videos, photos or any other kind of content.
An official press release by UK government today says
“Google and Microsoft have introduced a number of changes to their search function, not only in the UK, but across the world and National Crime Agency testing of the new measures shows that child abuse images, videos or pathways are no longer being returned against a blacklist of search terms at present.”
The report also talks about Google and Microsoft’s continues involvement to prevent internet crime and block illegal child crime content.
“Google and Microsoft will now work with the National Crime Agency and the Internet Watch Foundation to bring forward a plan to tackle peer to peer networks featuring child abuse images”
World’s largest search engine Google will now have warning before 13,000 search terms which are believed to associate with child sexual abuse and Microsoft will pursue the same.
Both search engines that cover a large portion of web search across the world are even working on ways to develop technology against internet predators. The UK government press release says
“Google will bring forward new technology that will put a unique identification mark on illegal child abuse videos, which will mean all copies are removed from the web once a single copy is identified”
However, other political party leaders in UK say that the web giants are just caving in under the political pressure and the issue is getting hyped for no reason. They argue if the tech companies are really concerned about the issue or it’s just a tactic to gain good publicity.
