Google Is Scanning Your Email for Child Porn
If you’ve spent any time on the Internet, you should know that privacy doesn’t really exist. Pretty much any site you peruse or app you take advantage of has someone watching you, tracking your every move (usually for advertising purposes). Think your email is your private digital sanctuary, and that no one is going through your conversations with friends? Think again, especially if you’re using Gmail. But don’t worry too much — yes you’re being spied on, but it’s for a good cause.
Apparently, Google is scanning all your emails for any signs of child sexual abuse. This shouldn’t come entirely as a surprise — Google has previously stated that its millions of users have “no legitimate expectation of privacy” when using their products and services. Most of this scanning is for the purposes of targeted advertising, but it has a secondary purpose: making sure users aren’t using their products to hurt children.
Google has a legal obligation to check emails for incriminating images. A federal statute demands that all electronic communication service providers must report any such crimes to officials. Google goes a step further; with its scanning technology they seek out any such images, take them down, and report them to the appropriate authorities.
Already one case of child pornography has been dealt with thanks to Google’s rigorous research. John Jenry Skillern of Texas was arrested after the company noticed him saving pornographic images of children on his email account. Google sent a cyber-tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and local authorities conducted a full investigation. Skillern, who has a history of sexually abusing children, was found to be promoting and endorsing child abuse.
How does Google find possible child abusers? Well, every image has a unique computer code called a "hash." These hashes are compared to those in a giant database of images involved in known child abuse. If any of them match up, Google passes on the information to law enforcement for appropriate measures to be taken.
Google doesn’t see this as overstepping its boundaries; in fact, they view this move as a public service Google co-funds the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) as part of its efforts to make the Internet a safer place. As Google’s chief legal officer David Drummond explained in the Telegraph last year, the IWF does what he described as the "critically important work that few of us could stomach — proactively identifying child abuse images that Google can then remove from our search engine.”
Google insists that it doesn’t read the text of your emails (so your terrible grammar mistakes are safe for now). It only looks for the code of illegal images. In fact company officials claim that you could be plotting out elaborate schemes in writing on Gmail, and nobody would be the wiser — so long as it doesn’t involve child pornography. Officially, the company will go no farther than that in its quest for justice. Any other criminal activity is far beyond the company’s reach.
This issue perfectly illustrates the uneasy balance of privacy versus protection in the digital world. On one hand, Google is stopping the trading and promoting of harmful and illegal images – as the case of Skillern shows. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that nothing we do online is really private, and give up any illusion that our personal business will remain just that? These are not easy questions, and it doesn’t look like the answers are coming any time soon.
[Pic via Flickr - Hillary]
