News

Over the last 4 years we have been sounding the alarm that implementing end-to-end encryption without the appropriate safeguards will significantly impact on our ability to protect children. We, along with many others in the child safeguarding sector, warned tech companies that end-to-end encryption provides perpetrators of child sexual abuse the opportunity to conceal their activities and that this would lead to lower reporting rates for child sexual abuse material. We were told that there was no evidence to suggest this would happen. Today, we have the evidence that this is exactly what has happened.

As reported in The Telegraph, the figures to be released today by the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) show that reporting of child sexual abuse by Facebook has dropped by 40% since the implementation of end-to-end encryption on the platform, and by 20% for X, Google, Discord and Microsoft.

This is unacceptable and comes with a catastrophic cost to children’s safety. Every month UK law enforcement was using the information from those reports to NCMEC to arrest over 800 child sex abusers and safeguard around 1,200 children. Now, their ability to protect children is significantly hindered.

Meta, and other platforms who have implemented end-to-end encryption have closed their eyes to the abuse that happens on their services. It is technically feasible to detect child sexual abuse material within end-to-end encrypted environments, but these platforms have chosen not to implement such measures. They did this despite knowing that the consequences of this would be to provide safety and privacy for those who wish to abuse children, and that they would no longer be able to see or report the abuse that takes place on those areas of their service. As a result, there are now many children whose abuse is going undetected, perpetrators who are not being held to justice, and victims and survivors living with the fear of their images circulating online in perpetuity without being reported and removed.

Meta needs to respond to this data as a matter of urgency and set out the actions they will be taking to restore reporting to pre-encryption levels, at the very minimum.