Google Sweeps Drive & Mail To Find Child Sexual Abuse Cartoons

The advent of the internet made it essential for Big Tech to stop crimes from proliferating online. This means the execution of AI detection tools and human moderation, among several other protection methods.

These entries into consumers’ private lives have drawn great contention. Apple itself was caught in a months-long debate this year after announcing it would scan users’ photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM), a move it has since pigeonholed.

Google’s own CSAM detectors raised a flag on cartoons portraying lewd acts involving children in a Drive account in late 2020, and upon turning these findings in, it was handed a search warrant to find out more about the suspect owning this content, per a Forbes report.

While it is known that Google is able to identify explicit photos and videos in accounts, the warrant discloses for the first time that the tech giant can comb animations for potentially illegal imagery too.

To make such discoveries, Google uses one or two technologies. In the first, it relies on “hashes” of previously flagged material on YouTube. The other is a set of machine learning tools trained to recognize files with suspicious content.

Forbes reported the suspect to supposedly be “a known artist” who’s won multiple small art competitions in the Midwest and whose artwork “had been mentioned in a major West Coast newspaper” in the 1990s. However, as charges have not been filed against this individual, his name was not published.

Upon uncovering “digital art or cartoons depicting children engaged in sexually explicit conduct or engaged in sexual intercourse,” Google shared the information—including IP addresses—to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), as it is legally obligated to. The organization then sent these details to the DHS Homeland Security Investigations unit, which tracked down the suspect using the given IP addresses and looked into his account and emails.

As the news outlet pointed out, the revelation that Google also scans animations in Drive storage accounts might appall artists who use nudity in their crafts. To avoid erroneous implications, though, US law mandates prosecutors to prove offending imagery to be purely “obscene” without “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

[via Forbes, cover photo 104313256 © Bigtunaonline | Dreamstime.com]