Under the microscope for links to unsavory and illegal online enterprises, Google suddenly seeks to explain what a great job it’s doing

It’s no coincidence that Google’s attempting to grab the tech news headlines with blog posts this week trumpeting the company’s ongoing efforts to fight the scourge of online child porn and illegal pharmacies. Google’s links to illegal and unsavory activities is long established, but with increased public scrutiny thanks to the NSA snooping stories and declarations like that of Mississippi Attorney General Tom Hood asserting Google’s search aids online criminals, it seems that Googleiath’s powers that be  felt the time had come for some much-needed reputation burnishing.

And so, this week we have not one, but two new Google blog posts that are designed to grab the news cycle and  put the Silicon Valley giant in a more favorable light.  Never mind that most of it’s really just old news repackaged to fit their latest PR campaign.  The first PR blast came  Saturday via this post, trumpeting Google’s role in the battle against child pornography online.

Google has been working on fighting child exploitation since as early as 2006 when we joined the Technology Coalition, teaming up with other tech industry companies to develop technical solutions. Since then, we’ve been providing software and hardware to helping organizations all around the world to fight child abuse images on the web and help locate missing children.

There is much more that can be done, and Google is taking our commitment another step further through a $5 million effort to eradicate child abuse imagery online. Part of this commitment will go to global child protection partners like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation. We’re providing additional support to similar heroic organizations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Latin America.

Since 2008, we’ve used “hashing” technology to tag known child sexual abuse images, allowing us to identify duplicate images which may exist elsewhere. Each offending image in effect gets a unique ID that our computers can recognize without humans having to view them again. Recently, we’ve started working to incorporate encrypted “fingerprints” of child sexual abuse images into a cross-industry database. This will enable companies, law enforcement and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing these images, and to take action against the criminals. Today we’ve also announced a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to encourage the development of ever more effective tools.

While it goes without saying that any effort to battle child pornography is laudable, and it’s great that the company is “making news” by donating 2 million more to the cause, but in my (cynical) view this donation appears to not to be driven by altruism, but is more likely born from a not-so-subtle desire to rub elbows with “heroic” organizations and in order to generate positive media buzz for a company facing increasing criticism over its handling of privacy and piracy/counterfeiting issues.  Google’s assertion that it employs “hashtag” technology to identify and block offending imagery also raises the question as to why they can’t do more to prevent pirated content from appearing in their search results?  Oh, but I digress….

Then today, the Google PR machine was back in action with this post outlining supposedly ongoing efforts to battle illegal (rogue) online pharmacies also appears to be part of their efforts to burnish their increasingly tattered reputation:

For the last several years, Google has worked closely with a number of organizations, government agencies, and businesses to combat rogue online pharmacies from all angles.

Collectively, we are making it increasingly difficult for these operators to effectively promote their rogue pharmacies online. A variety of websites and web services are refusing ads from suspected rogue pharmacies. Domain name registrars are removing suspect rogue pharmacies from their networks.  Payment processors are blocking payments to these operators, and social networking sites are removing them from their systems too.