More than a hundred children’s organizations have asked Facebook in a letter to review the decision to encrypt Facebook services. Facebook wants to provide Messenger and Instagram Direct with e2e encryption, but the children’s organizations fear the safety of children.
According to the open letter, recognized by the BBC and others, the encryption ensures that child abusers ‘have a place to hide’. In their letter, the organizations ask Facebook if the company wants to stop the plans for the rollout of the encryption until ‘sufficient security nets’ have been set up. The children’s organizations do not say what for safeguards this must be.
The organizations point out that Facebook could actually improve the detection of abusers, but instead “blinds itself.” The organizations believe that Facebook should not represent financial gain or design choices for the safety of children. The organizations are led by the British institution The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Facebook says in a response to British public service broadcaster that children’s safety is of critical importance. The company says it cooperates with child safety experts and “comes first” when it comes to securing children from exploitation. In 2018, Facebook is said to have forwarded 16.8 million indications of child abuse to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). This would have led to 2500 arrests. NCMEC expects that the implementation of e2e encryption can lead to 70 percent fewer Facebook instructions. After encryption, Facebook itself can no longer read the messages.
It is not known when the end-to-end encryption should become available. A Facebook programmer said last month that the Messenger implementation of this can take ‘years’. Mark Zuckerberg promised the encryption in March last year to make Facebook more privacy-friendly. Earlier, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia already objected to Facebook’s encryption plans.
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