Should online services be allowed to search customer chats? What could help in the fight against depictions of child abuse is causing criticism from data protection advocates. Today the EU Parliament is setting out its position on this.
The numbers are depressing – the sexual abuse of children online is apparently quite ubiquitous: Internet companies worldwide reported more than 85 million images and videos depicting abuse in 2021 alone. The number of unreported cases is likely to be huge – and the trend is constantly increasing, as EU Interior Commissioner Ylva Johansson explains her proposed law: “It is there to protect children from sexual violence. It is there to protect the victims of these terrible crimes from it “Seeing it over and over again on the internet and having to live through it.”
Europe as a crime scene
Three out of five depictions of abuse known worldwide are on a server in an EU country, according to data from the Internet Watch Foundation. In Germany, the volume has increased tenfold within a year. And there is particularly strong resistance from the German side to the Commissioner’s proposal to require online services to search the communication of their users in the future – also known as “chat control”.
EU MP Moritz Körner speaks of the “snooping initiative”. And parliamentary colleague Patrick Breyer worked on the final negotiating position for the Pirate Party in the Interior Committee. They now demand significantly less control, says Breyer: It is the official position of the EU Parliament, supported by a large majority, that chat control should be stopped and secure encryption guaranteed. “This means: Instead of mass screening of private communications without cause, only targeted surveillance of certain people and groups should be permitted if there is specific suspicion.”
“A very strong intervention”
According to Parliament’s wishes, encrypted chats should not be able to be prevented or broken into. Providers could also not be obliged to search for potential images of abuse directly on the smartphone if in doubt. From Birgit Sippel’s point of view, who sits on the responsible interior committee for the SPD, this is an important point: “This client-side scanning, i.e. going onto the devices, is a very strong intervention. If you say: ‘We have now have the key and can look in at any time,’ then this key will also be used – beyond the question of child abuse. And that would then be something where you can’t really get things back.”
But with so much focus on data protection, is child protection being overlooked? No, says Sippel, it’s about proportionality and chances of success: “Many images of abuse that are stored in Europe may not be the place where the crime occurred. The question is whether the perpetrators and the perpetrators can also be identified by recognizing and deleting the images Finds victims.”
Time is running out
Jonah Thompson from the Internet Watch Foundation is alarmed by such arguments. If this parliamentary position were to prevail in the negotiations with the EU member states, it would be a fatal step backwards for child protection: “This creates a ridiculous chicken-and-egg scenario: You first have to prove suspicion on the part of individual users before the detection can even begin “If this proposal from the EU Parliament were also adopted by the Council, the nightmarish effects will soon be felt.”
But the 27 EU states are still fighting for a position. Time is of the essence: without a new set of laws A regulation will also expire in the summer of 2024, on the basis of which online services can voluntarily report images of abuse to the authorities in the EU.
Until then – at least so far it seems – people have mainly discussed which interventions in communication could go too far. However, less has been said about what could really help in the future in view of the ever-growing spread of child abuse online.