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Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has said Meta’s planned rollout of end-to-end encryption will create “safe havens” for paedophiles online unless robust safety measures are introduced, PA Media reports.
Braverman accused the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, of failing to provide assurances that underage users will be protected from sexual predators. Along with security minister Tom Tugendhat and safeguarding minister Sarah Dines, she has called on the firm to “work with us” and enable police officers to access data to build investigations where appropriate, PA says.
In an interview with LBC this morning, Braverman said:
Here in our country we arrest about 800 perpetrators a month. We safeguard about 1,200 children a month. Those are monthly figures, not annual figures. We estimate there are up to 800,000 individuals in the country who pose a risk of sexual harm to children in some form or another.
And what we’re seeing is an increasing level of incidents of perpetrators, child sexual abusers, choosing, I have to say in the main, fora like Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct, both owned by Meta, to conduct these evil crimes. They groom children. They identify children. They solicit children online. They pretend that they are children. They dupe them. They gain their trust and then they manipulate them into performing sexual acts, indecent acts, pornographic acts … And that is child abuse. That is criminal behaviour. And this is happening on an industrial scale.
And what Meta is proposing – they’re proposing to roll out end-to-end encryption without safety measures – will fundamentally make fora like Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct safe havens for paedophiles to operate in the dark.
As PA reports, Meta has said it already restricts people aged over 19 from messaging teenagers who do not follow them and expects to continue providing “more reports to law enforcement than our peers”. A company spokesperson said:
The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
We don’t think people want…
2023-09-20 04:40:30
Post from www.theguardian.com
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