This is a problem online companies better take more seriously. All over the Web people are blogging about the MySpace allowance of pornography and sites not suitable for young viewers.
Google (GOOG) has been talked about before concerning its negligence in protecting children better. Now, in response to their indifference, Jeffrey Toback, a Democrat of the Nassau County Legislature, has filed a 16-page complaint alleging that Google is receiving money from paid links which offer up child pornography.
"When it comes to the protection and well-being of our nation's innocent children, [Google] refuses to spend a dime's worth of resources to block child pornography from reaching children or to filter out search terms such as 'child pornography' or 'kiddie porn' or the content to which such terms lead," the complaint said.
Google's response through a spokesman was that Google has the SafeSearch function which blocks any adult material from its website, and that where child pornography is found the site concerned is permanently excluded from Google searches and local law enforcement agencies notified.
This is something that just baffles me. They are taking the same route that has infuriated families across America concering Hollywoods' refusal to police itself and put it all on the parents.
People don't want to wait for this garbage to be found and taken care of, they want it pre-empted before it is seen in a proactive way. The same thing with sites like MySpace who wait to find the junk and then take care of it rather then having filters in place not allow it to be uploaded in the first place.
How hard can this be to do? Other sites are doing it. How can they think that they can just callously say that you have a 'SafeSearch function,' use that and basically don't bother us about it. Not only is it callous, but it doesn't in any way make any marketing or branding sense.
They should be aggressively pursuing this and getting the message out that they have a zero tolerance policy toward child pornography. Do you think their statement makes any sense? Don't you think that this is a dangerous thing to let lay at the company's feet?
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