A draft text for the protection of children on the Internet of the European Commission alarm all the giants of the sector.
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Does a new Brussels text project threaten the private character of messaging like Whatsapp, Imessage, Tiktok, Messenger or Signal? This is what technological companies and non -governmental organizations (NGOs) for the defense of privacy regarding the regulations For” Child Protection on the Internet “, proposed Wednesday, May 11 by the European Commission. The text, centered on the fight against child pornography, would establish a “European center for the fight against the sexual exploitation of children” and would impose on the large online platforms to “measure the risks of distribution of infantile pornography or solicitation of a character Sexual “, to quickly delete illegal content and to report all the childhood detailed content detected.
Above all, the text provides for an “targeted detection obligation”, which would force the services to delete content reported by a national authority. To do this, companies will have to “deploy technologies as little intrusive as possible, in accordance with the law and existing technologies, and will have to limit the rates of false positives as much as possible”. These formulations are very wide. For its detractors, the text creates a contradictory injunction to monitor the messages exchanged while respecting the privacy of users.
“Do not weaken encryption”
The project already arouses shields. The pattern of WhatsApp, the filial messaging of Meta, Facebook parent company and Instagram, launched a severe warning: “It is incredibly disappointing to see a proposal for European Internet regulation which does not protect encryption from Bout “, judged Twitter Will Cathcart, in reference to technology which, on WhatsApp or Signal, encodes messages, so that they can only be read by the transmitter and the recipient. The text makes no mention of encryption but does not say either how the obligation of “targeted detection” would apply.
“If the European Union imposes a detection system dedicated to a type of content in Europe, it will then be used in the rest of the world to weaken human rights in many ways”, predicts Mr. Cathcart. The latter had already taken a stand in Le Monde, mid-2011, against the draft article 10 of the law relating to intelligence in France.
For Meta, which deals with a large part of the indication of child pornographic content in Europe, “it is important that the measures do not harm end -to -end encryption which protects the privacy of billions of people, including children” . The group says it focuses on the tools “which allow the assaults to be prevented from occurring upstream, by not leaving, for example, adults send messages to adolescents with whom they are not connected, and identifying the potentially dangerous behaviors “.
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