STATEMENT | Tegan Insoll & Anna Katariina Ovaska | December 2023
Encrypted platforms are quickly becoming a safe haven for individuals who perpetrate crimes of sexual violence against children online. The current trend among tech companies of adopting end-to-end encryption on their platforms significantly endangers the safety of children, as it hinders law enforcement efforts to identify and rescue victims of sexual abuse and prevents the detection and removal of child sexual abuse material.
Protect Children’s latest research shows that child sexual abusers use encrypted services to contact children. The preliminary findings from our research on undetected child sexual abuse material (CSAM) users in the dark web reveals the widespread use of encrypted services and messaging apps to contact children and disseminate child sexual abuse material. 29% of respondents to our ReDirection survey of people searching for CSAM on dark web search engines say that they have used a messaging app to search for or view CSAM. The most used messaging apps for these purposes are end-to-end encrypted.
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This research is conducted by Protect Children, with the support of the Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund.
