Commissioner\u2019s recommendations for tech companies include measures that have been criticised on privacy grounds.<\/p>\n
Australia\u2019s internet watchdog has accused tech giants including Google and Apple of failing to take action against child sex abuse on their platforms.<\/p>\n
In a report released on Wednesday, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said tech platforms were failing to implement various measures to protect children, including scanning cloud services for known abuse material and using language analysis tools to detect attempted sexual extortion in messaging services.<\/p>\n
Grant said that Apple and YouTube, which is owned by Google, also failed to track reports of child sex abuse and could not say how long it took them to respond to the reports they received.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt shows that when left to their own devices, these companies aren\u2019t prioritising the protection of children and are seemingly turning a blind eye to crimes occurring on their services,\u201d Grant said in a statement.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to keep the pressure on the tech industry as a whole to live up to their responsibility to protect society\u2019s most vulnerable members from the most egregious forms of harm and that\u2019s what these periodic notices are designed to encourage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Grant added that the companies had taken few steps to improve their efforts since being asked three years ago, \u201cdespite the promise of AI to tackle these harms and overwhelming evidence that online child sexual exploitation is on the rise\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo other consumer-facing industry would be given the licence to operate by enabling such heinous crimes against children on their premises, or services,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Google disputed the report\u2019s findings, saying they were rooted in \u201creporting metrics, not online safety performance\u201d and that more than 99 percent of abuse material on YouTube is automatically removed before being flagged.<\/p>\n
\u201cChild safety is critical to us,\u201d a Google spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve led the industry fight against child sexual abuse material since day one, investing heavily in advanced technology to proactively find and remove this harmful content.\u201d<\/p>\n
Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Snap, and Discord, which were also included in the report, did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
Tom Sulston, head of policy at Digital Rights Watch, said that while it was important for authorities to take action against online child abuse, some of the tools supported by the internet watchdog would raise serious civil liberties and privacy concerns.<\/p>\n
Sulston said that scanning live calls\u00a0and private messages would require platforms to abandon end-to-end encryption, which prevents communications from being viewed by anyone apart from the sender and receiver.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a gross invasion of privacy for all of the people making perfectly innocent and reasonable use of the service,\u201d Sulston told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt also has dangerous knock-on effects where the users of that service would be subject to surveillance from hostile actors \u2013 foreign governments, criminals, hackers. That\u2019s a huge risk for civic society, activists, journalists and anyone who communicates on the internet.<\/p>\n
Breaking encryption would be \u201cdisproportionate and dangerous,\u201d Sulston added.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t expect the post office to open all letters and read them for illegal content \u2013 in fact, most countries have laws specifically against this,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Commissioner\u2019s recommendations for tech companies include measures that have been criticised on privacy grounds. Australia\u2019s internet watchdog has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[77,64,63,48,164,237,1314,105],"class_list":["post-48043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-asia-pacific","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-crime","tag-economy","tag-internet","tag-social-media","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}