A Pervert Was Arrested After Google Looked Through His Gmail Account (And That's a Good Thing)

A man in Houston was recently arrested after stashing pictures of children being sexually abused in his Gmail account.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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News flash: Google is scanning through your emails. But don't worry, your boring email thread to your long distance lover is safe. That's not what Google wants.

Instead, Google is looking for child pornography, which the Internet has a lot of hidden (and some not so hidden) in its dark murky corners. A man in Houston was recently arrested after stashing pictures of children being sexually abused in his Gmail account. Google uses a system developed by Microsoft to automatically scan pictures that are uploaded to its servers and identify if they are child pornography (so it's not like Google employees are going through your private photos one by one). Once Google was alerted to the pictures, they notified the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. From there they found out the man was a registered sex offender, having been convicted of sexually assaulting a child twenty years ago. Police used this info to get a search warrant, and subsequently found more pictures of children and sexually explicit texts on the man's other devices.

Yet, this isn't anything unique to the Web. “Sadly all Internet companies have to deal with child sexual abuse,” a spokesperson for Google explained. “This evidence is regularly used to convict criminals.”

If you're worried about Google going through your emails (assuming they do not have child pornography), don't be. At least not yet, and at least not according to them. “It is important to remember that we only use this technology to identify child sexual abuse imagery, not other email content that could be associated with criminal activity (for example using email to plot a burglary)," the spokesperson added.

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