If it’s up to the European Commission, big tech companies like Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft should detect child abuse on their respective platforms themselves. While 85 million photos and videos of child sexual abuse were said to have been reported last year, ‘no more images were ever reported’. According to the committee, this requires companies to proactively search for such material, or large fines will be incurred.
The European Commission will require technology companies to:
- Parties should estimate for themselves the risk factor for the chances of child abuse being shared on the platform.
- European Union Member States should designate a national authority that decides whether the estimated risk factor is realistic.
- Companies should combat child abuse with the lowest possible impact on users’ privacy and the lowest possible false positive probability, based on parameters set by the EU.
- Service providers should report child abuse if anything is detected.
- Member States may order the removal of images.
- App stores should prevent children from downloading apps that include: grooming could reveal.
- The EU Center verifies reports of child abuse before turning the case over to local authorities.
Most of the companies are already scanning images of child abuse, although it’s not clear how well the tech giants are complying with the proposed EU rules. Bee client-side device scanning For example, all images in a chat or cloud storage are compared against a database. If the images match, the child abuse detected is reported.
The biggest objections to this type of scanning are users’ privacy and the reliability of a tracking system. For example, Apple already wanted to detect child abuse on iPhones, but came up with a plan that was criticized by many. Since then, no new plans have been put on the table by the iPhone maker. Other organizations criticize the European Union; According to critics, spyware would actually be installed on everyone’s device.
Source: European Commission
Source: Hardware Info
