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YouTube shuts down comments on videos with young kids
YouTube is taking far-reaching actions to prevent a repeat of the pedophilic comments that plagued videos on the service. It has disabled comments on "tens of millions" of clips with young children in them over the past week, and plans a "broadening" of this action in the months ahead for both videos with young kids as well as those with older kids that "could be at risk of attracting predatory behavior."
UK to question Tinder, Grindr over age checks in dating apps
Tinder and Grindr are about to face close scrutiny over their age policies. The UK's Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Wright, plans to ask the dating app giants about their age verification and safety systems after a Sunday Times report revealed dozens of incidents of sexual assault and exploitation against children who managed to sign up for the app, including over 30 instances of rape. He wanted to know what tools Tinder and Grindr had in place to "keep children safe from harm," and vowed "further action" if the dating services didn't provide adequate answers.
FBI forces suspect to unlock iPhone X with Face ID
In what may be a world first, the FBI has forced a suspect to unlock his iPhone X using Apple's Face ID feature. Agents in Columbus, Ohio entered the home of 28-year-old Grant Michalski, who was suspected of child abuse, according to court documents spotted by Forbes. With a search warrant in hand, they forced him to put his face on front of the device to unlock it. They were then able to freely search for his photos, chats and any other potential evidence.
Australian police posed as child abusers for a dark web sting
Where do you draw the line when trying to catch child abusers? That's what authorities have to decide when they run sting operations on the dark web. When Norwegian newspaper VG investigated one of the biggest child exploitation sites on the dark web, Child's Play, they found that it had been run by Australian police for three months. The special unit out of Brisbane, dubbed Argos, had undercover detectives posting and sharing abuse materials on the site. The newspaper held off on reporting until now, a year later, to allow the police to finish its investigation.
Parents lose custody of two kids after abusive YouTube 'pranks'
Once again, what you do online can have devastating real-world consequences. The latest example of that is Heather and Mike Martin, who recently lost custody of two of their five children after the videos on their YouTube channel caught the public eye. The Martins regularly played cruel "pranks" on their kids with a camera rolling, uploading footage at a steady pace and amassing over 760,000 subscribers in the process, the Washington Post reports.
Google sheds light on its child porn detector after sex offender arrest
Thanks to Google, a sex offender was recently arrested after the company tipped off authorities about finding illegal photos of children in his email. Despite the good that came out of it, it raised a number of questions, such as "does Google regularly look into the contents of our email?" A Gmail spokesperson has gotten in touch with AFP to clear the air and revealed that each image that depicts child sexual abuse actually has a unique digital fingerprint, which a special Google technology can detect. While the spokesperson didn't talk about it in detail, that technology might be what the company supposedly developed last year: a system that can trawl the web and email accounts for child sex images. Gmail's rep made clear, however, that Mountain View only uses the system to detect child porn -- it can't actually parse emails that contain details of any other criminal activity, like burglary.
Google email scan helps police arrest a sex offender
Google has long used automatic image scanning to fight online child exploitation, but it's now clear that this monitoring applies to email, too. Houston police have arrested a registered sex offender after Google tipped them off to illegal photos of children in his Gmail account. The notice only led to a warrant at first, but it helped the cops discover locally stored images that they wouldn't have found otherwise.
Google to block child sex abuse search results globally over the next six months
Eric Schmidt himself took to the British press to announce that Google has made a big step in ridding its search results of links to underage sexual abuse -- with some image detection assistance from Microsoft. The Google chairman said he hired a 200-strong team to work out a solution over the last three months and that their work has already fixed up to 100,000 potential queries. The UK Prime Minister David Cameron has welcomed the news as "significant progress." He's also praised Google's previous set of measures, which displayed a warning to people attempting to search for illegal material and caused a 20 percent drop in illicit activity. For now, Google's newest improvements are limited to English-speaking countries, including the UK and US, although the search company says it'll roll out its adjusted search globally over the next six months, covering 158 more languages.
