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Google + still used by Pedos?
Why Do Child Porn Predators Love GOOGLE PLUS/ Google + ?
What Eric Schmidt failed to acknowledge in his “truly global” announcement was how child pornography and sexual predators were pervading another site in Google’s cache: Google’s eponymous social networking platform, Google Plus, launched in 2011. Schmidt’s catchall networking site, which revolves around the creation of friend “circles,” remains populated by sexual predators on the hunt for child and teen porn.
“We all know that there’s a dark side to the Internet, but most of that people have to go out of their way to look at it,” says John Simpson, privacy project director at Consumer Watchdog, a California-based advocacy group. Simpson adds: “That’s not the case with Google Plus.”
In a 27-page report published in December, the result of a seven-month investigation by an anonymous Internet whistle-blower, Consumer Watchdog presents a number of features unique to Google Plus that make the site a haven for child-porn perverts. Of those features, the organization highlights in particular the site’s hallmark “circles,” online social groups that users create to organize the people they follow. Circles allow Google Plus users to add fellow users to their networks without their recipients’ permission, meaning that perverts, as a result, may follow stashes of children without the kids’ accepting their requests (à la Facebook friend requests).
The organization also takes fault with the site’s automated “suggestions”—what the organization calls a “recruitment tool“—by which predators easily find pages and people related to their “interests.” Most suggestions are based on listed interests and those already in their circles.
A screenshot from the Consumer Watchdog report on Google Plus shows how it's being used by child sex predators to organize accounts and solicit child porn material. (Consumer Watchdog)
Technicalities such as these make for a much larger issue, given the scale and spread of Google Plus, which, as Consumer Watchdog highlights in its report, is set to become the world’s second-largest social networking platform.
“Turning a blind eye to the troubling privacy vulnerabilities on Google+ while encouraging greater use of the social network is simply unacceptable,” wrote Consumer Watchdog in an open letter (published along with its December report) to Google’s Schmidt and Google’s chief executive, Larry Page.
(Google Plus)
But during an investigation of the platform, Consumer Watchdog’s whistle-blower stumbled on a number of interactions and posts directly defying these two policies. The whistle-blower found not only users who posted video and picture footage linked to outside porn sites, but also “self-identified pedophiles,” those who advertised interests such as “all things pervy.” Many of these pedophiles’ circles included young boys and men, some of them in states of undress.
Another screenshot from the Consumer Watchdog report on Google Plus shows how it can enable predators. (Consumer Watchdog)
Likewise, Consumer Watchdog’s work has gone relatively unnoticed. Internet Watch Foundation, a child protection agency based in Cambridge, U.K., says it knows very little about child-predator interactions on Google Plus.
CHILD PERVS ON YOUTUBE
The behaviors mentioned here are similar to those on YouTube we've already written about. Seemingly innocuous dares posed by users who act like teens turn out to be from perverts who get off on the feet of teens and tweens.
Nevertheless, pornography, specifically child pornography, is a deep-seated and neglected issue on Google Plus.
The network’s communities offer a space for concerned volunteers to share what they’ve flagged. “This is not a porn site,” writes Google Plus user Jennifer Isaacs in one such community “against child exploitation.” She adds: “And it is where children seem to be more easily groomed every day.”
https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/why-do-child-porn-predators-love-google