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New Government figures show that there are up to 830,000 people across the UK who pose a sexual threat to children – either online or in person. In the UK, there are over 400,000 searches for child sexual abuse online each month, with law enforcement identifying an estimated 27 million images in total.
Around 34,485 offences across the country involved indecent images of children online in the year ending December 2022 – a 13 per cent increase from 2021 – while cases of the most severe forms of online child sexual abuse have more than doubled since 2020 say the Internet Watch Foundation.
Social media companies currently hand over information to UK law enforcement, which assists in the arrest of around 800 suspected child sex offenders each month. An estimated 1,200 children are also safeguarded each month by the handover. However, The UK Government argues a new end to end encryption (E2EE) rollout could impact how able social media companies are to report instances of online sexual abuse.
End to end encryption allows messages to be only seen by the sender and receiver. Tech buffs currently use it to keep personal information like bank transactions and online purchases secure, but a number of social media companies are considering using the system to give users more privacy.
This will override current controls. At present, social media companies frequently scan their platforms to identify and report material relating to child sexual abuse (like images, videos and grooming conversations) to The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
NCMEC then passes these referrals on to relevant law enforcement agencies, so abusers can be arrested and kids can be protected. But the Government says E2EE poses a catastrophic risk to the current system should safety measures not be put in place prior – and social media companies will not be able to find and report abuse in the same way.
The Government warns: “Intentionally implementing E2EE without necessary safety features will blind social media companies to the child sexual abuse material that is being repeatedly shared on their platforms. More child sexual abuse content will go unreported and unchecked and that will put more children in greater danger.
“The UK government supports strong encryption. We are not asking companies to stop the implementation of E2EE across their messaging services. We are instead urging all social media companies to implement sufficient child safety measures on their messaging platforms that will maintain and/or enhance the identification and prevention of child sexual abuse.”
While Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram) has led the fightback against child sexual offences with hash matching technologies, the company and other competitors are now planning to roll-out E2EE across their messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct Messages – likely, later this year.
NCMEC say that around 70 per cent of Meta referrals could be lost after this. Currently, Facebook and Instagram account for more than 85 per cent of referrals of child sexual abuse from tech companies globally. E2EE will significantly reduce this figure, say the Government – who urge companies to ‘develop a solution’ which ‘protects child safety online’.
However, campaign groups on the other hand say that the Online Safety Bill ‘threatens our right to privacy online’ – despite Government promises of making ‘the UK the safest place in the world to be online by placing new duties on social media companies’.
In a 2022 article, Big Brother Watch explained how end to end encryption ensures messages are ‘crucial to the safety of journalists, human rights defenders, whistleblowers and vulnerable groups both in the UK and all over the world’. The group also say that the Online Safety Bill ‘undermines and endangers our fundamental right to privacy’.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, meanwhile, say: “End-to-end encryption ensures that governments, tech companies, social media platforms, and other groups cannot view or access our private messages, the pictures we share with family and friends, or our bank account details.
“This is a universal right, and one that is a particularly vital protection for the most vulnerable in society – such as children or human rights defenders who rely on private messaging to do their jobs in hostile environments. The UK Parliament is moving forward with its Online Safety Bill, which would undermine encryption.
“Clause 110 mandates that websites and apps must proactively prevent harmful content from appearing on messaging services. That’s going to lead to universal scanning of all user content, all the time. It’s not compatible with encryption, or our right to privacy.”
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