Child safety groups and prosecutors criticize encryption of Facebook and Messenger
Meta’s decision to introduce end-toend 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