for naked baby pictures it's bound to happen.

"Hey, this part of the image has a darker pixel in the center, but around it there is no depth."

Sucks to be the flat-chested porn stars. Or are there any?

"... according to US law, if we keep these images or forward them to anyone else we are committing a crime".

How can that be possible? How can be that, if you forward it to a legal body, say Brazilian justice or Interpol, you are comitting a crime. Would any actual judge or tribunal upheld that?

It really feels like they are sheltering behind a very narrow interpretation of the law and trying to protect their criminal customers with a legal pretext.

Shut down Orkut and every social network. We are human beings, some of us do good and some do bad.

...can't these guys (and it is mostly guys) just be normal and want to shag women - proper, grown up, developed women - or indeed men, as their preference may be - whatever, as long as they're just adults. Seriously. Just lay off the kids, there is no need.

What technology do they have to detect child porn images? It would need to have the ability to distinguish children, and human nakedness in the context of an image. Strange technology if it really exists. I heard an urban legend that BYU had implemented naked boob detecting image technology back in the early 2000s, to keep their internet network safe and clean (totally bogus of course).

And, what happens on false positives? Someone rooting through albums marked private? What's the point of having them marked as such.

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me, after all as far as the law of every other nation is concerned the brazilian authorities are just foreign civilians, they have no special status that would allow you to exchange such material with them any more than anyone else.

Most distribution laws etc tend to have an exception which excludes sending it to the police for evidence purposes, however sending it to anyone else would still be illegal.

If the images are stored in their US based datacentres then US laws would apply which apparently (going by their statement) the US laws allow for distribution only if you are sending it to the national centre for missing and exploited children - therefore if they were to send the images from their US datacentre to some brazilian user they would be committing an offence (even if that brazilian user happens to have the status of police officer within brazil under brazilian law, outside brazil they do not)

In the UK we have passed laws which make it illegal for the Google support team to look at the offending pictures in the first place let alone forward them!

The offence here is making a copy and simply viewing viewing a picture on a PC has been deemed as making a copy by the UK legal system due to the temporary files involved. Thus should a UK Google employee look at an album and find such an item, by doing so they have left themselves open to prosecution.

"currently implementing more effective image filters that will detect and prevent the uploading of child pornography."

but surely it would be far better if it just detected the image, then raised the alarm and sent someone round to the place from where the image is being uploaded and firebombed it? (or at least give the address to the appropiate enforcement agency so they can go around and apprehend the freaks)

if their fancy image-detecting software is going to be used to reject the images from being uploaded, then these sickos are just going to find somewhere else to upload their perverted images.