Children will be ‘left exposed to sexual abuse online under current safety rules’

Children will not be protected from child sexual abuse on private messaging platforms under current plans for the Online Safety Act, a group of charities have warned.

In a joint letter to home secretary Yvette Cooper and technology secretary, Peter Kyle, the charities argue current wording of the rules creates an “unacceptable loophole” for encrypted messaging services to avoid taking down illegal content.

The letter points to wording in online safety regulator Ofcom’s codes of practice, which say that platforms must remove illegal content where it is “technically feasible” – a phrase the charities claim will be used by encrypted messaging services to argue that they “cannot be held accountable for the take down of illegal content”.

End-to-end encryption, offered by a number of messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, and by other services, means that no other than those in a conversation can access its content, including the firms hosting the messages.

In its letter, the charities said they were “deeply concerned” about the Ofcom codes of practice as they stand and that they would enable “some services to evade delivering the most basic protections for children.”

They said: “It is important to be clear about the implications of this decision.

“Whether it is a child being sent a nude image of themselves as a form of sexual extortion, or an adult being exposed to child sexual abuse material in a group chat, on some sites users will not be able to confidently report and have this content removed.

“Child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) material will stay in circulation, continuing to put children at extreme risk and resulting in great harm for victims, in direct contradiction of the Act.”

The letter has been signed by the NSPCC and Barnardo’s, as well as the Marie Collins Foundation, the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, and the Centre of Expertise on child sexual abuse.

It comes as the debate over encrypted services and potential access to them has reignited after it was reported that the UK Government had ordered Apple to allow it to access encrypted files uploaded to the cloud.

Police and security services around the world have pushed for more access to encrypted communications in recent years, warning that it allows criminals such as terrorists and child abusers to more easily hide and hampers their efforts to catch them – an issue also raised by online safety campaigners.

In response, tech firms have argued that users have a right to privacy and that any backdoors into software created for intelligence and security services could also be exploited by criminals or authoritarian regimes.

In their joint letter, the charities have called on the Government to “set out how they will be upholding their responsibilities to children and ensure that private messaging spaces to not become a safe haven for the most egregious forms of online abuse”.

The letter follows the recent publication of Home Office data, which showed more than 38,000 child sexual abuse image crimes were logged by police forces in England and Wales over the past year – an average of more than 100 every day.

Last month, The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a charity which proactively finds and helps remove child sexual abuse material from the internet, also raised concerns about the wording of the codes of practice, calling it a “blatant get-out clause” for platforms and could be used to help them evade compliance with online safety laws.

An Ofcom spokesperson said: “The law says that measures in our codes of practice must be technically feasible.

“However, we expect the vast majority of platforms will be able to take content down and we will hold them to account if they don’t.

“There’ll be measures all platforms will need to take to protect children, such as reviewing child sexual abuse material when they become aware of it and reporting it to law enforcement.”