Do We Want Google To Have This Much Power; Child Pornographer Caught By Gmail Scan.

A slightly disturbing piece of news: a child pornographer has been caught as a result of Google scanning his emails for known images of child abuse.

Hundreds of millions of email accounts are now being routinely scanned for illegal images, thanks to sophisticated new Google software

"Technology giant Google has developed state of the art software which proactively scours hundreds of millions of email accounts for images of child abuse.
The breakthrough means paedophiles around the world will no longer be able to store and send vile images via email without the risk of their crimes becoming known to the authorities.

Details of the software emerged after a 41-year-old convicted sex offender was arrested in Texas for possession of child abuse images.

Police in the United States revealed that Google’s sophisticated search system had identified suspect material in an email sent by a man in Houston. 

Child protection experts were automatically tipped off and were then able to alert the police, who swooped after requesting the user’s personal information from Google."

Yes, we know that Google has been scanning our Gmail in order to serve us ads. But this newer link into the criminal justice system is worrying. For of course such a tactic is not going to remain applied to one crime and one crime only. We can easily enough imagine extensions of it to mentions perhaps of drugs, or drug dealing. Or in countries with a rather lower level of protection for civil liberty than our own for certain buzzwords to do with the politics of those countries. And don’t forget that Google is subject to the laws of the countries in which it operates. If, say, China requires that emails that contain “Tiananmen Square” be reported to the Chinese security agencies then Google will have to comply or not do business in that country (and I think Google has declined to do some work inside China on that basis and Yahoo has not so declined).

The point being that having now shown that they can monitor email for the proof of one crime the company will come under ever greater pressure from a number of sources to apply the same monitoring techniques to evidence of other crimes. And there’s plenty of place around the world where it is criminal to do things we regard as being a lot more benign than child pornography. Even, places where it’s illegal to do things that we consider to be basic human rights. It seems to me inevitable that this technique, however just people may think it to be for this one particular crime, is going to expand out to many others.

Of course, one can simply not use Gmail, one can also simply not do anything that might constitute a crime, but it’s still worrying to me that our communications are to be so vetted.