- Omar Ayman Gaber
- Fayez Mohamed Meabed
- Mahmoud Mustafa Ahmed
- Eslam Gamal Ali
- Mohamed Ashri Mustafa
- El-Adham Nagy Khazim
Child safety groups and prosecutors criticize encryption of Facebook and Messenger
Meta submitted nearly 95% of 29m reports of child sexual abuse material in 2022 and encryption will make it harder to detect
Meta’s decision to introduce end-to-end encryption for Facebook
messages will hamstring the rescue of child sex trafficking victims
and the prosecution of predators, according to child safety
organizations and US prosecutors.
This week, the tech giant announced it had begun rolling out automatic encryption for direct messages on its Facebook and Messenger platforms to more than 1 billion users. Under the changes, Meta will no longer have access to the contents of the messages that users send or receive unless one participant reports a message to the company. As a result, messages will not be subject to content moderation unless reported, which social media companies undertake to detect and report abusive and criminal activity. Encryption hides the contents of a message from anyone but the sender and the intended recipient by converting text and images into unreadable cyphers that are unscrambled on receipt.
Social media companies are legally obligated to send any evidence of child sexual abuse material they detect to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the US, which then forwards it to relevant domestic and international law enforcement agencies.
“Encryption on platforms without the ability to detect known child sexual abuse material and create actionable reports will immediately cripple online child protection as we know it,” said an NCMEC spokesperson. “NCMEC anticipates the number of reports of suspected child sexual abuse from the larger reporting companies will plummet by close to 80%.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, submitted nearly 95% of the 29m reports NCMEC’s CyberTipline received from tech companies in 2022. A large proportion of these tips depicted child sexual abuse material in which children are being raped, abused and sexually exploited, according to the organization.
The identification and rescue of exploited children would be made more difficult by encryption, as investigators would often only be able to identify victims by gaining access to a suspect’s social media accounts and private messages, said Ali Burns, an assistant US attorney in Illinois.
“To get the messages, it’s going to rely on us finding their physical phones. But as far as getting a tip if something happens, if those aren’t being monitored, it will definitely change the cases and what we’re currently made aware of,” Burns said. Burns has prosecuted cases of predators using Facebook and Messenger to groom teenagers. “It would make it more challenging to corroborate evidence, to be able to verify. I can see this being a challenge for law enforcement.”
Civil rights groups argue, however, that end-to-end encryption
protects individuals’ personal data and free expression. Creating a
loophole in user protections for one use case inevitably leads
governments and other bad actors to use those entry points for
surveillance and other nefarious purposes, they argue.
“This level of security not only protects individuals from cyber-attacks but also empowers citizens to communicate freely without fear of surveillance, censorship, and warrantless searches – whether by the government, Big Tech, data brokers, or anyone else,” read an October statement from the American Civil Liberties Union, a non-profit human rights organization.
Meta said in a statement to NBC: “We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so we have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent and combat abuse while maintaining online security. We continue to strengthen our enforcement systems to root out potentially predatory accounts.”
Messenger is no stranger to content depicting the abuse of children. A Guardian investigation in April revealed how Meta is failing to report or detect the use of its platforms for child trafficking
This week, the tech giant announced it had begun rolling out automatic encryption for direct messages on its Facebook and Messenger platforms to more than 1 billion users. Under the changes, Meta will no longer have access to the contents of the messages that users send or receive unless one participant reports a message to the company. As a result, messages will not be subject to content moderation unless reported, which social media companies undertake to detect and report abusive and criminal activity. Encryption hides the contents of a message from anyone but the sender and the intended recipient by converting text and images into unreadable cyphers that are unscrambled on receipt.
Social media companies are legally obligated to send any evidence of child sexual abuse material they detect to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the US, which then forwards it to relevant domestic and international law enforcement agencies.
“Encryption on platforms without the ability to detect known child sexual abuse material and create actionable reports will immediately cripple online child protection as we know it,” said an NCMEC spokesperson. “NCMEC anticipates the number of reports of suspected child sexual abuse from the larger reporting companies will plummet by close to 80%.”
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, submitted nearly 95% of the 29m reports NCMEC’s CyberTipline received from tech companies in 2022. A large proportion of these tips depicted child sexual abuse material in which children are being raped, abused and sexually exploited, according to the organization.
The identification and rescue of exploited children would be made more difficult by encryption, as investigators would often only be able to identify victims by gaining access to a suspect’s social media accounts and private messages, said Ali Burns, an assistant US attorney in Illinois.
“To get the messages, it’s going to rely on us finding their physical phones. But as far as getting a tip if something happens, if those aren’t being monitored, it will definitely change the cases and what we’re currently made aware of,” Burns said. Burns has prosecuted cases of predators using Facebook and Messenger to groom teenagers. “It would make it more challenging to corroborate evidence, to be able to verify. I can see this being a challenge for law enforcement.”
“This level of security not only protects individuals from cyber-attacks but also empowers citizens to communicate freely without fear of surveillance, censorship, and warrantless searches – whether by the government, Big Tech, data brokers, or anyone else,” read an October statement from the American Civil Liberties Union, a non-profit human rights organization.
Meta said in a statement to NBC: “We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so we have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent and combat abuse while maintaining online security. We continue to strengthen our enforcement systems to root out potentially predatory accounts.”
Messenger is no stranger to content depicting the abuse of children. A Guardian investigation in April revealed how Meta is failing to report or detect the use of its platforms for child trafficking