The Internet has plenty of dark corners, but one of the darkest is surely the growing number of sites that traffic in child pornography. Google, which has no interest in surfacing any of these sites and images, has long worked with numerous nonprofit organizations and law enforcement agencies to help protect children online and keep these sites out of its index. The company has, however, recently been criticized by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and others for not doing enough to fight child pornography online.

Today, Google pledged $5 million to the fight. It will distribute this money to a number of organizations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Latin America. Among the organizations that will receive these funds are groups like the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the U.K.’s Internet Watch Foundation. Google has also set up a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to “encourage the development of ever more effective tools.”

Since 2008, Google has been tagging the child abuse images it detected in its index and those that were reported to organisations like the NCMEC to ensure that it could also identify any copy of these files.

In today’s announcement, Google revealed that it has recently started to add this information to a cross-industry database that it shares with law enforcement agencies and charities. This, Google believes, will allow these organizations to “better collaborate on detecting and removing these images.”

Later this week, representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and a number of telecom firms will also meet with the U.K. Culture Secretary to discuss this issue.

It’s worth noting that Google is obviously not the only search company that is working to combat child pornography online. Microsoft has a similar initiative, and the company also tags images of child abuse it finds using its PhotoDNA technology. Facebook started licensing PhotoDNA from Microsoft in 2011. The company has also been working with a number of law enforcement agencies to develop the Child Exploitation Tracking System.

A report today by financial news and analysis service FinX says the Bankers Association of Zimbabwe have proposed that mobile money services be included in new banking reforms for the country. This, the bankers say, would create a level playing field in an sector facing significant disruption from mobile phone operators. The bankers have complained that the absence of such regulation will see their lunch eaten by the mobile operators as mobile is a cost effective way to reach the unbanked.
A bank executive who spoke to FinX anonymously is quoted in the report: Cell phone companies are welcome to offer MMS but they should do it via banks. For example Ecocash is using various banking platforms and that is a noble strategy, but there is concern that banks have no guarantee that Econet will not steal their clients
Econet Wireless has registered significant success signing up users to its EcoCash mobile money service, managing to get some 1.7 million subscribers just a year after launch. The company also announced this week that at least US $100 million is being transferred from the country’s urban centres to rural areas through the platform. Last year, Econet acquired a local financial institution, TN Bank, primarily to drive the adoption of its mobile money service.
Service adoption and transaction figures from the only other mobile operator playing in the mobile money space, NetOne, are not clear. Indication in the market however is that the requirement by NetOne for subscribers to exchange their regular SIM cards for high capacity ones that have the MMT application, has held back adoption.
Telecel Zimbabwe, the third mobile operator in the country, launched an MMT service back in January 2011, but killed the service later in order to focus on their GSM network core service.
The majority of Zimbabwean banks interconnected through a national switching platform called Zimswitch Shared Services and have been introducing mobile money and banking services through it. Suggestions in the market however are that Zimswitch doesn’t yet have seamless MMT access to close to 60% of the mobile subscribers in the country (Econet’s subscribers).

Techzim.co.zw