Police authorities and search engines forms alliance to beat child pornography - Swedish Picsearch limits the risk of finding child pornography on the Internet

STOCKHOLM, Sweden, July 12, 2007 - It was announced today that Picsearch will be the first search engine to form an alliance with police authorities with an aim to decrease the sexual exploitation of children around the world. The police authorities will frequently provide Picsearch and other selected search engines with a list of identified websites with commercial child pornography. All indexed pages matching the list from the police will deleted from the searchable databases, decreasing the risk for end-users to find child pornography. Stefan Kronqvist, Head of IT Crime Section of the Swedish National Criminal Police, says, -By incorporating the list of child pornography websites within the Picsearch search services, which contain over 1.7 billion images, we can prevent the user from finding images of abused children. This will lead to a decrease in the number of new visitors on child pornography websites. Search engines are the most popular and the most powerful tools for Internet users to find information and entertainment online. Most people have online access today and among young people the PC is considered to be more important than the TV (eMarketer July 2007). Robert Risberg, CEO at Picsearch, says: - We believe that every search engine has a responsibility to limit the ability to find child pornography. We invite all our colleagues within the search industry to join us. National police authorities in many countries have for the past couple of years backed a voluntary cooperation with local Internet providers in which the police block the access to a number of known sites with commercial child pornography. The new cooperation between the police authorities and search engines will expand the effectiveness dramatically. Another major improvement is that the work done by the police in Sweden will be implemented in all search engines using Picsearch technology around the world. The full implementation of this project will be completed in August. About Picsearch Picsearch AB (publ) is a premium provider of image and multimedia search services. The services are market leading in relevancy and family friendliness. Picsearch powers several leading Internet sites as well as its own Internet properties. Picsearch was founded in 2000, is privately held and headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. For more information please visit www.picsearch.com. About the IT section of the Swedish Criminal Police The IT section of the Swedish Criminal Police focuses on investigations involving IT criminality. The section also develops methods for securing evidence in IT investigations. An important part of the IT section is the Child protection team whose main objective is to protect children from sexual abuse and sexual exploitation. The cooperation with search engines is a part of the team's effort to stop recruitment of new criminals of child pornography. For more information please contact: Carl Sarnstrand, Communications Manager at Picsearch Tel: +46 73 204 14 79 E-mail: carl.sarnstrand@picsearch.com Information from the Swedish Criminal Police. www.polisen.se