21st Century Child Abuse: A Conversation with Emily Cashman Kirstein, who leads child safety public policy at Google

Emily leads efforts to keep children safe online at one of the world’s largest and most powerful technology companies, Google. Previously, she led the policy team at Thorn, a tech-focused nonprofit working to end online child sexual abuse. And earlier, she spent seven years both in her home state of New Hampshire and in Washington, DC as an assistant to US Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH). In the Radio Kempe Podcast, Emily outlines the comprehensive steps Google is taking to keep children safe online, including using new technology tools to match the “hash values” (digital fingerprints) of images of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) so the images can be quickly reported and removed. These tools include “classifiers” to identify never-seen-before content, and other innovations. She indicated Google is not only using these tools on its own platforms but is making them available to other companies. She also discussed work Google is doing on parental education and mentioned a Google collaboration with the Royal Academy of Pediatrics and Child Health in the UK to better identify children harmed online and intervene. She also discussed the work that Google is doing to identify and mitigate the risks to children from Generative AI.