5/5/2023 0 Comments Facebook messenger desktop“Imagine there was a proposal from the government to put a video camera in every living room in a country hooked up to the internet,” he told the Guardian last month, “so the government can turn it on when they’re investigating a crime. and an ever growing number of people that have a sexual interest in children.”īut WhatsApp’s Cathcart warns that the downside of weakening encryption is worse. police lead on child protection has said much the same: “Unless the tech industry starts to take this really seriously, we are going to see the exponential growth in the numbers of images we are recording, the continuing abuse of children. If content is being shared and we don’t have access to that content, if it is content we cannot see then it is content we cannot report.”Ī few weeks ago, the head of Britain’s MI5 warned that by encrypting Messenger, Facebook would give a “free pass” to “some of the worst people in our society.” And this week, the U.K. lawmakers whether cases of child abuse might “disappear” once encryption is in place, admitted that “I would expect the numbers to go down. But earlier this year, the company’s head of global policy management, when asked by U.K. Working together also gives us more information to identify abusive accounts and allows us to introduce safety features behind the scenes like restricting interactions between adults and minors.”įacebook’s spokesperson also told me that encrypting Messenger would not impact on its ability to flag and prevent such online harms. When asked about this issue, Facebook told me that “we’re building strong safety measures that are designed to prevent harm from happening in the first place and give people controls to respond if it does. While an emergency reprieve has addressed this, child advocates claim this is illustrative of the impact encryption will have. children’s charity NSPCC tells me that “10% of child sexual offences on Facebook-owned platforms take place on WhatsApp, but they account for less than 2% of child abuse the company reports to police because they can’t see the content of messages.” We saw the impact this can have with the 58% reduction in child exploitation reports after the EU’s ePrivacy directive. pedophile David Wilson to justice this year say that he may not have been caught with Facebook expanded encryption in place. Where a messenger is directly linked to a social media site that hosts user profiles, especially where that includes minors, there are serious risks in shielding messaging content, in preventing that content form being monitored. MORE FROM FORBES Why Delayed Google Chrome Update Is A Reason To Switch By null Facebook’s most controversial update in years risks the platform “failing to protect children from avoidable harm,” one of the world’s leading children’s advocacy groups, NSPCC, warned this week, telling me that the evidence they have seen suggests “a significant drop in reports of child abuse” on its sites.
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