Police report button to be put into Live Messenger

Users of Microsoft's Messenger email service will be able to report suspected sexual predators directly to the police at the click of a mouse.

In an attempt to protect the 11 million users of the service from potential abusers, the software giant has struck up a partnership with the UK government-backed Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre.

Microsoft will add a "report abuse" icon to Messenger that will link any users worried about their anonymous internet buddies directly to online police services.

Set up earlier this year to provide a single point of contact for the public, law enforcers and the communications industry to report the targeting of children online, CEOP offers advice and information to parents and potential victims of abuse and works with police forces around the world to protect children.

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Microsoft puts police link on Messenger

 

I think its good, anyone giving you abuse you can report them to the police too.

 

I think it will be the button which gets abused! MS should filter the "reports". Maybe they are doing and I just read it wrong. There will too many "he called me a nasty name" reports too!

 

Ditto. You can report a person for trying to contact you when you don't know them. how many of those are you gonna get? Few thousand? I'd say easily.

 

If it gets abused, all the Police have to do is ban the email address.

 

With the other 200,000 addresses.

 

Damn, my cover'll be blown! hah, I'd like to see how this system plays out, sounds interesting. I saw a special on TV about internet kiddi pervs, its freakin gross to watch the lengths that these adults go to in order to get the children to meet them. One guy said he'd show up naked, and when he got to the house it was the host of the show with some cops and he's like "put this towel on, you're under arrest"....priceless

 

More to the point, they seem to be happy to take the risks. A large portion are caught because they use thier credit card details to buy thier way into websites. If you are able to get your computer on the net surely you have the intelligance to know credit card transactions can be tracked?! I doubt the risk of someone filing a report from a chat thing will bother most kiddi fiddlers.