Dark side of the push for privacy via encryption
Imagine a seedy motel owner in your area who knew certain rooms they hired out were being used to create child sexual abuse videos, and not only did they do little to stop it, but also intentionally put a lock on the door to prevent police from getting into that room.
Instead of a motel of hell, it’s an app on your phone in your pocket, which estimates it will make, according to investor data, $37bn in revenue for the first 2024 quarter.
Instead of the cliche of a lubricious by-the-hour landlord in a sweaty singlet, it’s a clean-cut tech billionaire in a V-neck.
Many would offer their lives to prevent this filth, would refuse to be the beneficiary of a medium that allows children to be abused, but global company Meta has moved to allow video to be easily shared while encrypting its platforms, locking out the rescuers.
The latest Australian Federal Police annual report hearing at Parliament heard the nation’s most senior police bosses warn that encrypting Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct would inevitably lead to a drop in referrals of potential child sex abuse, while the “motel rooms” are only getting busier.
How much knowledge of evil in a dark corner of your house do you need to know about before you’re considered to have become the aider, abetter, and accomplice?
Meta is a commercial enterprise; its responsibility as a corporate citizen is to know if there is child sexual abuse occurring in its rooms and to make it easier, not harder, to stop.
“The sadder thing is that encryption is going to mean we’re going to go dark, we’re going to have more of our children in this country abused and harmed, and the perpetrators will be getting away,” AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw told a joint committee.
While the local publican could lose his business if he doesn’t abide by rules such as refusing alcohol to a minor, the overseas technocrat faces no such consequence for far worse.
It could, if it wanted to (and had been doing), run a tool over “abhorrent, horrific images and videos” and refer them to police.
Before encryption, Meta – owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram – reported, globally, about 27 million instances of online child abuse in a year – in that same year, 2022, the highly encrypted Apple reported 234.
Now by encrypting these channels, Meta will be assisting in the exploitation of children.
On the one hand, Meta censors ideas, drafts out political voices, and cancels what offends the clique. On the other, it removes the ability to lift children into the arms of safety.
Giving evidence to a federal investigation into child exploitation, Meta recognised “a continuous responsibility for all stakeholders … to work together to protect children”.
Well, “all stakeholders” don’t make money from your platform. You do.
If a drunk driver kills a pedestrian you don’t blame the oversight of those who lived on the road.
When asked about the competing interests of individuals’ privacy and children’s safety, Meta proposed that privacy “is actually essential to safety”.
Tell that to the child being abused. Meta is more than happy to mark posts as disinformation with its crews of fact-checkers when they involve things such as the low energy output of a wind farm, which doesn’t suit Mark Zuckerberg’s ethos on climate.
Yet, Meta locks the door when it involves protecting the most vulnerable.
Meta is happy to profit from professional Australian journalism without paying for content, which will hurt regional reporters first.
At the same time, it provides sanctuary to the two worst kinds of humans on earth: child sexual abusers and the people who make money from them.
Democracy works on the back of an investigatory, impartial and fearless fourth estate but Meta is a state all of its own.
The only thing social media companies are politically good at is leaving almost every party unsatisfied after interactions at a legislative level, while at the same time getting hefty injections of taxpayers’ dollars from members’ and senators’ communications budgets.
At best, Meta entertains; at worst, it is another corporate citizen who is choosing to harbour child abusers and those who monetise their childdestroying illness as an industry.
Meta told the Department of Home Affairs that with end-to-end encryption on Messenger and Instagram Direct, law enforcement would rely on victims having to screenshot their abuse as evidence.
Placing the onus on victims to report abuse will mean cops can only respond to victims when the damage is done. In the Meta motel, those who could arrest the perpetrators are perpetually locked out.