Who's reading your e-mail?

New plans to scan e-mails for illegal images of child abuse may give the appearance that children are being safeguarded but they may not be as effective as they first seem, argues Technology commentator Bill Thompson.

Every time you send an e-mail it passes through a series of computers on its way to the intended destination.

Most of them are owned and managed by internet service providers, although if you use webmail from Yahoo, Google or Microsoft then it may take a different route.

But whoever provides your e-mail, the chances are they are having a look at every message you send or receive.

At the moment, their reasons are mostly benign, since they are looking for spam, viruses and other nasty stuff that we wouldn't want anyway.

Google mail users have got used to the fact that their e-mails are being read by a machine looking for context-sensitive ads to put on the same page, and most of us have encountered a company that reads all incoming e-mail looking for rude or inappropriate words, even if it sometimes appears absurd.

I used to edit an arts e-mail newsletter, and one issue was rejected by several recipients because it had an article on the Ars Electronica prize, but even with its flaws this helpful scanning is something that has obvious benefits.

And my internet service provider (ISP) helpfully lets me choose whether to have them look for spam or let it all through for me to deal with.

But if a plan being put forward by five US-based net companies goes ahead, the same approach could be used to look for e-mailed images of child abuse.

And the consequences for all net users could be more serious than just losing the odd legitimate message to the spam filters.

AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink and United Online have joined with the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to create what they call a "Technology Coalition" to look for new ways to safeguard children.

Their first initiative is a plan to create a database of the images of child abuse they find, and process each to create a "digital fingerprint".

They will then look at e-mail attachments and images traded over peer-to-peer networks, swapped on messaging services, or posted on websites to try to spot illegal images. Continued here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5132512.stm

This may be a good idea but there is no way they are going to catch every bad thing.

Sam is also reading our emails

Oh my gosh oh my gosh.

This is just some cheap scheme to provide jobs for paedophiles. Who do you think compiles the database? A computer? I don't think so. A bunch of middle-aged, drooling child abusers - fresh out of prison, with insatiable appetites for little kiddies. Imagine an interview of one of the staff members:

Interviewer: "Hello Mr./Ms./Mrs. X, what is it that you do, exactly?"

Employee: "Well, I have a variety of different tasks. But I'm mainly concerned with making the world's largest collection of paedophilic images"

Interviewer: "Oh...well...how fortunate you are that your job is also your hobby!"

Its a complete break of privacy, even if its ment for good. But obviously only im reading my emails duhhh

yeah everyone has there own right to privacy. but some companys are allowed to look if its on there computers.