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Google is an American multinational corporation specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Most of its profits are derived from AdWords, an online advertising service that places advertising near the list of search results.
Google receives numerous requests from law enforcement agencies for user information, including requests from ICE pertaining to child exploitation investigations. Google often informs its users of such requests (usually with an email subject "Notification from Google"), despite the fact that the summonses usually tell Google "You are requested not to disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time. Any such disclosure will impede this investigation and thereby interfere with the enforcement of federal law." The United States ranks No. 1 in terms of demands for Google customer data. India, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Brazil trail in that order.[1]
google.com/protectchildren
google.com/protectchildren is a site whose ad appears in response to certain search inquiries, such as "child porn", and warns, "Child abuse imagery is illegal. If you see it, report it". It also states, "At Google we work with child protection experts to find, remove and report this material because we never want it to appear anywhere on our products, including our search results. To report child sexual abuse content or to find help for a child in the US, please contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children." Interestingly, Google doesn't ask users to report child sexual abuse, but rather child sexual abuse content. Thus, the focus is not on stopping the abuse, but rather on stopping the distribution of the photographic records of the abuse.
The link leads to a blog post bragging about Google's "$5 million effort to eradicate child abuse imagery online" and describing the NCMEC and the Internet Watch as "heroic organizations". Most of the comments say stuff like "+1.000.000" or ask naive questions like "Is there a way to target people searching for the child abuse content to start targeting their inbox with ads for therapists or other mental health organisations" which demonstrate a lack of understanding of the dangers of signing up for such mental health "treatment".[2] Of course, those who hold dissident opinions for the most part probably do not feel comfortable posting such thoughts in a public forum, so the debate on this blog post is rather one-sided.
