A Gmail user from Houston, Texas was transferred and prosecuted with automated scans of his Gmail account of child pornography. The police found, according to the reference of Google in the search of the apartment further abuse images on the mobile phone and computer of the accused. The capture now raises many questions.
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How exactly Google scans the e-mail accounts of its users and to what extent is information passed on? According to his own data, Google has been scanning the photos sent via Gmail for child pornography since 2008.
For this, the company cooperates with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and compares the images with the existing databases. If there is a hit, the NCMEC is first informed, which then forwards the information to the authorities.
The NCMEC is an interface between US law enforcement agencies, cooperating companies, and private initiatives. It has among other things databases with known pornographic pictures. These databases use two technologies.
A database uses Microsoft's image-balancing software PhotoDNA. The program creates a signature of a photo and can make copies of it. According to Microsoft, it reads additional biometric data, and this data is used to identify highly alienated images.
Another database is based on hash values. These are number sequences that are generated from the contents of a photo. Images can be identified through this digital fingerprint, but they need neither be opened nor scrutinized.
In the United States, however, the legal situation is different. The Telecommunications Act (TKG) allows companies to scan the contents of e-mails only to protect their own systems, for example, to ward off malware. The e-mail scan by Google thus violates §88 TKG of the telecommunications secret.
According to Google, the image scans are used only for the fight against child abuse. The e-mail data should not be examined for other activities.
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