Facebook's encryption plans will make it harder to catch child sex abusers, governments warn

• End-to-end encryption, which Facebook plans for its Messenger service, makes it harder to catch child abusers, seven governments have warned.
• Officials in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, and New Zealand warned Monday that this encryption undermines a tech company's ability to respond to child sexual exploitation content.
• The UK's National Crime Agency said that if Facebook goes ahead with end-to-end encryption, it would make it harder to identify both victims and abusers.
• Facebook announced end-to-end encryption in its Messenger app in March 2019.
• It said Monday that it has "led the industry in developing new ways to prevent, detect, and respond to abuse while maintaining high security, and we will continue to do so."

Facebook's plans to begin encrypting messages sent on its social media platform will make it harder to catch people that are sexually abusing children, according to a joint statement from the UK, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, New Zealand, and the US.

The US tech giant announced in March 2019 that it would introduce end-to-end encryption in its Messenger app, meaning only the sender and recipient can read the messages sent on the chat. WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, already includes end-to-end encryption.

The governments jointly signed a statement on Monday arguing that end-to-end encryption posed a public safety risk, including to sexually exploited children.

End-to-end encryption "severely" undermined any tech company's ability to respond to "the most serious illegal content and activity on its platform, including child sexual exploitation and abuse," the report said.

End-to-end encryption would also stop law enforcement accessing content "in limited circumstances where necessary and proportionate to investigate serious crimes," it said.

It did not specifically name Facebook in this portion of the report — however, it later pointed out that in 2018, Facebook Messenger was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

It also said that "concern about these risks has been brought into sharp focus by proposals to apply end-to-end encryption across major messaging services."

It called on tech companies to work with governments to find solutions to ensure public safety, without stripping away user privacy or cyber security.

UK crime agency: Abuse image reports could dry up

Robert Jones, the UK's National Crime Agency director responsible for tackling child sexual abuse, told Sky News on Monday that if Facebook goes ahead with end-to-end encryption, it would make it harder to identify both victims and abusers.

The NCA would also potentially receive fewer reports of images of abuse, he said.

"The lights go out, the door gets slammed, and we lose all of that insight," he said.

"What we risk losing with these changes is the content, which gives us the intelligence leads to pursue those offenders and rescue those children."

In a statement to Sky News, a Facebook spokesman said:"We've long argued that end-to-end encryption is necessary to protect people's most private information.

"In all of these countries, people prefer end-to-end encrypted messaging on various apps because it keeps their messages safe from hackers, criminals, and foreign interference.

"Facebook has led the industry in developing new ways to prevent, detect, and respond to abuse while maintaining high security, and we will continue to do so."