Facebook privacy rules could help abusers, Zuckerberg warned
Senior officials from the US, UK and Australia have written an open letter to the Facebook chief as they announce a new treaty.
Friday 4 October 2019 06:55, UK
Mark Zuckerberg has been warned that Facebook's new privacy proposals could help child abusers evade detection, with an estimated 12 million suspected incidents going unflagged.
In March the chief executive promised that Facebook would implement end-to-end encryption across all of its messaging services, a design which would mean nobody other than the sender and the recipient of a message would be able to read its contents.
It comes as the UK and the US signed a "landmark" data access agreement - the first of its kind - to tackle terrorists, child sexual abusers and other serious criminals, the Home Office said.
The reciprocal arrangement means law enforcement bodies could demand a criminals' electronic data directly from technology companies based in either country.
Home Secretary Priti Patel and US Attorney General William Barr are among the senior figures reopening the divisive debate within the technology industry about governments' access to communications.
They have written an open letter requesting that Facebook includes "a means for lawful access to the content of communications" for law enforcement - a proposal which has historically been criticised as a "back door" which would undermine the protections applied to users' messages.
The governments argue that the description of the access mechanism that they want as a "back door" is misleading, but stress that so-called "warrant-proof" encryption would have a critical impact on child protection.
It is such "warrant-proof" encryption which Mr Zuckerberg is being criticised for.
This means even Facebook would be unable to comply with many requests for data in child protection and terrorism cases.
Currently the social media giant does comply with many of these requests and proactively files reports when it discovers child abuse on its platform, raising 16.8 million of them last year.
That figure could drop by 70% down to less than five million under the new proposals because the systems it uses to identify that material would no longer be able to view message content.
According to the UK's National Crime Agency, reports from Facebook last year resulted in more than 2,000 arrests and almost 3,000 children being safeguarded.
More than 99% of these cases came about after the company's safety systems identified a potential abuse situation, according to Facebook's own figures.
The letter warned Facebook against "deliberately design[ing] their systems to preclude any form of access to content" even in immediate threat-to-life situations.
It added that the company moving its multiple services, including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp onto a single platform meant that it was posing an even greater risk to public safety.
The senior officials claimed this would provide "unique routes for prospective offenders to identify and groom our children".
Ms Patel said: "Terrorists and paedophiles continue to exploit the internet to spread their messages of hate, plan attacks on our citizens and target the most vulnerable.
"As Home Secretary I am determined to do everything in my power to stop them."
She added the "historic agreement" will dramatically speed up investigations, allowing law enforcement agencies to protect the public.
Speaking in a livestream of the company's weekly internal Q&A session following the signing of the agreement, Zuckerberg said he had been aware of child exploitation risks before announcing his encryption plan and acknowledged that it would reduce tools to fight the problem.
"When we were deciding whether to go to end-to-end encryption across the different apps, this was one of the things that just weighed the most heavily on me," he said.
Addressing an employee question about online child abuse, Zuckerberg acknowledged that losing access to the content of messages would mean "you're fighting that battle with at least a hand tied behind your back".
However, he said he was "optimistic" that Facebook would be able to identify predators even in encrypted systems using the same tools it used to fight election interference, like patterns of activity and links between accounts on different platforms.
He also suggested the company might further limit the ways adults can interact with minors on Facebook's platforms.