Meta's Encryption Spin: Are They Protecting Kids or Predators?
I have just finished reading this insightful article, which goes into great detail and explains just another reason why social media platforms' increased use of end-to-end encryption is tipping the scales in favour of online predators.
One of the reasons the first step a predator takes is to move the chat with their victim to a 3rd party app, like Signal or Whatsapp, has been to protect themselves from monitoring and allowing them to take as long as they like to groom the child with very little fear of sending up any red flags. By continuing the rollout of encryption across more of their platforms just increase the number of locations where they can conduct their targeting of children, removing more and more safe havens.
Thanks to
for helping to raise awareness of the issues that such actions by social media platforms are having.I previously wrote about this topic, as it is a subject that has continued to be an increasing danger to the safety of children online. I encourage you to read that one below.
If evidence were needed that encryption is protecting online predators, the statistics in the article go a long way to prove it. Reports of suspected child exploitation have always been a drop in the ocean compared to the actual amount of abuse that occurs around the world, but prevention of any abuse is always going to be better than none and actions like this by the social media platforms is only doing more to allow for the creation of many more victims.
In a statement, a Meta spokesperson said: “We’ll continue working with NCMEC to make our reports as valuable as possible and we expect to continue to report more than any of our peers.” Meta said that it increased the number of reports involving direct contact with minors, and noted that even in its encrypted environments, it provides users with reporting tools.
What worries me about this statement is the fact that Meta are spinning things and trying to infer that they are still better than their peers, completely ignoring the fact that they are in fact decreasing the security currently afforded to children, which can always be better and should not be made worse. They then try to defend their actions by stating that in the encrypted environments users have access to reporting tools. Are they forgetting that the users concerned are children? They are trying to shift the responsibility for protecting children online onto the very child who needs to be protected!
This to me is unforgivable and no amount of spin can forgive the actions of Meta and the other tech companies who will no doubt be following suit. This is just another reason why you as parents will need to step up and take more responsibility for educating your children to be able to recognise dangers online and take action to call it out.
As you know I often talk about having open & honest communications with your children with no judgement, allowing them to come to you whenever they are concerned by something or feel uncomfortable. With the expansion of end-to-end encryption this will start to become even more important.
Meta has said that it embraced end-to-end encryption on the platforms to provide more safety, security and privacy for its users. The company has also stressed that it built safety measures to combat abuse and made changes to its age policies.
More spin from the PR people at meta who are really earning their wage on this one! Providing more safety, security and privacy for its users, as long as they arent children it seems.
As parents please understand the dangers online and how they relate to the safety of your child, if you take the mindset of “It will never happen to us” or “The government/Law Enforcement/Tech companies will protect them” you are setting yourself up for failure and that failure could result in your child becoming the next headline on the news or part of a statistic, you really don’t want them to be included in.
It is for the reasons above I feel I will need to continue my blogging in an effort to try and tip those scales back in the direction of parents, teachers and others who want to protect children, it may hurt or trigger me from time to time but that is a price I am still willing to pay for as long as Government and Tech Companies continue to protect the evil that lurks in the dark corners of the internet.
As always, thank you for your support. Please share this across your social media, and if you do have any comments, questions, or concerns, then feel free to reach out to me here or on BlueSky as I am always happy to spend some time helping to protect children online.
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About the only solution I can think of here to protect children and adults like me who are privacy conscious and don't, for example, maybe want our Governments snooping in on messages pertaining to our personal financial arrangements or expression of political opinions, is the compromise of age verification for IM apps and for all mesaages to/from children under the age of 16 to be unencrypted.
My concern here is that the road to Totalitarian Government Hell is paved with good intentions, and there are no intentions better than protecting our children.
My only concern with the compromise I've proposed is pushing of age verification costs onto platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal, and rendering their current operating models (donations, in the case of Signal) uneconomical. We need a form of decentralised identity management like never before. I am certain Zero Knowledge Proofs that are being pioneered by various Crypto blockchains are going to be the answer here for both facilitating this and ensuring our Governments do not have too much power, and that we don't end up creating a plethora of unencrypted hacker honeypots to be hit in the future.