The UK Home Secretary has urged Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram as well as WhatsApp, to abandon plans to implement “end-to-end encryption” on direct messages sent from Messenger and Instagram. The technology, which is already enabled on WhatsApp, prevents anyone other than the sender and recipient of a message from accessing its content – including Facebook itself, as well as law enforcement and government security agencies. Writing in the Telegraph, Patel warned that the feature could limit police’s ability to investigate and prevent child abuse. “Parents need to know that their children will be safe online. The consequences of insufficient protection – especially for end-to-end encrypted social media platforms – would be devastating,” he wrote. “Many child predators use social media platforms such as Facebook to discover, target and sexually abuse children. These protections must be in place before end-to-end encryption is rolled out worldwide. Children’s safety should never be an afterthought.” Patel’s comments were prompted by an announcement earlier this month that Facebook would move forward with plans to test the change. Although the company said plans for the test had been in place for a long time, it announced the decision shortly after it came under fire for handing over to police the instant messages of a 17-year-old accused of having an illegal abortion. in Nebraska. Facebook says it was unaware police were investigating an abortion when it handed over the data, but US pro-choice groups have criticized the company’s cooperation with investigators. At Netroots Nation, an American gathering of left-wing groups, activists plastered the company’s booth with signs reading “Facebook is not free” and “Fix Facebook now,” urging the company to leave the booth unstaffed for the second day of the conference . Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. By enabling end-to-end encryption, the company would not be able to hand over the data to the police, even if it had a legally binding search warrant. However, it will also not be able to monitor communications between users for other reasons, such as finding and reporting child abuse images shared in direct messages. In 2021, Facebook alone found and reported 22 million images of child abuse to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a US nonprofit that coordinates responses to child abuse online. Instagram reported an additional 3.3 million, and there are fears among activists that end-to-end encryption could see those numbers plummet, accounting for several million instances of shared child abuse images disappearing from sight. “Meta’s announcement that it is testing its default end-to-end encryption before ensuring that effective child safety mitigations are in place will put children at immediate risk,” said Andy Burrows, the NSPCC’s head of online child safety policy. . “Private messages are the frontline of child sexual abuse online and this will start to turn a blind eye to the company, meaning less child abuse will be detected.” Patel’s comments come as the fate of the Internet Safety Bill, which aims to create a new internet regulator with powers over sites like Facebook, hangs in the balance. The bill, which failed to make it onto the legislative timetable before the summer recess, will likely be revived in some form by the next prime minister, but the tone of the Conservative leadership contest strongly rejects aspects of the bill that are seen as “legislation for insult’, including attempts to clean up older laws such as the Malicious Communications Act by replacing them with a new offense of ‘harmful communications’. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said: “Experts are clear that technologies such as those proposed in this paper would undermine end-to-end encryption and threaten people’s privacy, security and human rights. We have zero tolerance for child exploitation on our platforms and focus on solutions that don’t require intrusive scanning of people’s private conversations. We want to prevent damage in the first place, not just detect it after the fact. “We already do this by banning suspicious profiles, restricting adults from messaging children they are not connected to, and defaulting under-18s to private or ‘friends only’ accounts. We also encourage people to report harmful messages to us so that we can see the reported content, respond quickly and make referrals to the authorities. We continue to work with outside experts and law enforcement to help keep people safe online.”
