Whatsapp’s vanishing texts ‘a gift for groomers’
THE NEW “disappearing messages” f eature on Whatsapp has been described as a “gift for groomers” by child safety campaigners who have warned it will provide an “invisibility cloak” for paedophiles.
The messaging service, which is owned by Facebook, announced yesterday that it would soon let users set the app to automatically delete their messages after one week.
The feature mimics functions in other popular messaging apps such as Snapchat, which lets users send ephemeral messages that delete after a specified amount of time.
The Whatsapp version will let any one person in a one-to-one chat conversation activate the feature. Both parties will be notified the autodelete is on and it will then start to delete all the messages. In group chats, it will be the admin who can activate the feature.
The NSPCC warned the feature would help groomers “avoid detection and erase evidence”.
Andy Burrows, the NSPCC’S head of child safety online policy, said: “Despite its age restriction, many under-16s use Whatsapp and disappearing messages could put children at greater risk of harm by providing groomers with yet another tool to avoid detection and erase evidence.
“Facebook must spell out how they mitigated the effects this feature will have on their, and law enforcement’s, ability to combat grooming and child abuse images when efforts are already hampered by the impact of encryption.”
The charity added that the Government needed to urgently introduce duty of care laws to ensure social media giants did not put children in greater danger with new app features.
Ministers are expected to outline further details in coming weeks of plans to impose a statutory duty of care on tech companies to better protect their users, a measure The Daily Telegraph has campaigned for since 2018.
The proposals will likely mean tech companies have to prove to a new online regulator, expected to be Ofcom, that new features do not make it easier to abuse or groom children online.
Companies who breach their duty of care could face fines running into the billions, criminal prosecutions and even a ban from the UK.
Although Whatsapp has a technical minimum age of 16, it has no effective
‘They must spell out how they mitigated the effects this will have on their ability to combat grooming’
age checks to prevent children using it.
Child safety experts warned police already struggle to glean evidence from the app due to its heavy encryption, which means even Whatsapp cannot see what is sent in messages.
They also argue the new feature would make it harder for police and parents to see evidence when children reported grooming attempts.
John Carr OBE, a former government adviser on online child safety, said: “A cloak of invisibility is just what paedophiles want. This is another gift and helping hand to them from big tech, which further imperils children online.
“Children’s charities will have to update their guidance to parents.”
The new feature is due to be released later this month. Whatsapp said yesterday, adding: “We’ve carefully built our disappearing messages feature to enable people to report problematic content to us so we can take action.”