A recent report, published by the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, has warned that plans by technology companies to adopt end-to-end encryption to all of their messaging services is putting children’s safety at risk.

The report, Access Denied: How End-to-end Encryption Threatens Children’s Safety Online, says: “The privacy of direct messaging platforms can conceal some of the most heinous crimes against children, including grooming, exploitation and the sharing of child sexual abuse material.”

The basis of end-to-end encryption is that anybody that is not a participant of the conversation cannot access the messages. This includes the police, which means that crucial evidence of child sexual exploitation could be unattainable.

Millions of children in the UK use messaging platforms despite the age limits set in place. The most popular online messaging service used is WhatsApp, who already use end-to-end encryption however, platforms such as social media site chat services, including those that are attached to Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat have all announced plans to introduce End-to-end encryption by default.

A survey carried out for the report found that more than one third of 8-10-year olds and over half of 11-13-year olds admit to lying about their age to sign up for an online messaging service.

9 out of 10 children aged between 8-17 are using these platforms to communicate, 60 percent of 8-year olds and 90 percent of 12 years old are using a messaging app with an age restriction of 13+ years.

It is not just the age restriction figures that proved worrying, further evidence from the study concluded that almost 1 in 10 children have used a messaging service to chat with people they do not already know and 1 in 20 have shared photos or videos of themselves with strangers.

Recent warnings that end-to-end encryption could facilitate child abuse, has already been put to the government by the National Crime agency and the Home Office and the commissioners report echoes their worries.

Longfield’s report has made several recommendations to help protect children. This includes the governments duty of care to include ‘private communications’ by introducing a new online harms legislation to parliament in 2021, setting strong expectations of platforms to conduct age verification checks on all of their users and strong sanctions against any providers that are failing in their duty of care.

This new age that our children are living in can be a cause for concern, however it is their future, and we are all, the government, parents, social workers, school bodies and local authorities alike, going to have to find ways to ensure our children remain safe, both in the real world and online.

From the team here at Select Social Care.