“Companies could do more to combat child sexual abuse online, UK minister says”

Jess Phillips, UK minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, wants tech companies to do more to develop further technologies to detect abuse cases, she said in an interview with Euractiv. ..

The UK's Online Safety Act (OSA), which entered into force in October 2023, puts responsibilities on tech companies to ensure that their services are free of illegal content, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Similarly, the EU's CSAM legislative proposal provides a framework for tech companies to prevent, detect, and remove this material from their services, which also includes private messages.

But negotiations have been stuck in the Council over concerns by some member states that the proposal may undermine the privacy of encrypted messaging services…

JP: …

We're talking about tech companies that are flying into space and making driverless cars. I believe in them and their capacity to make it possible.

I'm not asking for them to crawl through everybody's messages and see what they can find. I am asking them to detect the specific hashes of child abuse images and other illegal content.