Google announces grant for online safety projects

Google has pledged more than £8 million to support organisations working to keep people safer online.

The company will use a new grant fund, the Google.org Impact Challenge on Safety, to provide support to charities, researchers and other organisations in Europe working on safety issues.

Google operates the world’s most popular search engine, as well as video platform YouTube and mobile operating system Android, which is used on more smartphones than any other system.

The firm’s vice president of trust and safety, Kristie Canegallo, said the new grant would be open to a range of groups that did not just operate online.

“These organisations might be focused on tackling hate and extremism in their communities, or helping young people stay safe online,” she said.

“They’re working on topics that don’t necessarily start when you open a laptop or end when you close one, but where technology can still play a role.”

Google said it would use the scheme to learn how “to make our own products safer and help people enjoy what the web has to offer”.

On Monday, a lawyer representing three victims of online sexual abuse told an inquiry that internet firms including Google were failing to tackle the issue of online abuse.

William Chapman told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) that technology giants remain “immune from liability no matter how reckless or indifferent” they are to the risks posed by paedophiles.

He also highlighted a prospective version of Google’s Chrome web browser, which will use end-to-end encryption by default and has concerned some online safety campaigners.

Mr Chapman said the update would make it “harder to block harmful content” and “easier, not harder, for child abuse to take place online”.

Last month, a Government white paper on online harms proposed the introduction of a mandatory duty of care for technology and social media companies, which must pledge to protect their users or face punishment from a new independent regulator.

Earlier this month, Google announced expanded tools that will enable users to extensively delete their data and location history from Google services such as the Maps app and the Google search engine.