Privacy Tools vs Online Child Exploitation and Abuse
Content warning: This post discusses the crime of child abuse and exploitation online.
Privacy advocates regularly dismiss the argument that online privacy tools, like encryption, are used by criminals and should therefore be regulated or even banned. Cash can be used by criminals too, but are you going to ban cash for everyone? is the commonly used retort. I want to argue here that the online exploitation and abuse of children is a unique crime type that cannot be so easily dismissed in discussions around the regulation of privacy tools.
Debate around the regulation of privacy tools
Online exploitation and abuse of children is assumed to be a subcategory of the broad concept on online crime in arguments against the regulation of privacy tools for the purpose of fighting crime and terrorism. The underlying logic here is that the advantage that those who create and spread this type of media gain by having access to encryption is collateral damage to tools that ultimately serve the greater good. Just like you wouldn't ban cash because it can be used for crime in the real world, neither should you ban or over-regulate encryption and blockchain technology because it can hide online crime.
One difference to note is that cash is an old tool that has evolved with civilisation, whereas encryption and blockchain technology are tools created in response to the threat of loss of privacy online.
While I advocate for online privacy tools, the inclusion of online child abuse as just one of the many crimes people can commit using these tools is simplistic and short-sighted.
Wide-spread encryption undoubtedly enables child abusers and pedophiles to hide their activities from the police, making the job of protecting children from the worst experiences and arresting the adults involved in the crimes more difficult.
Children are dependent on adults for safety, protection and care. That puts the exploitation and abuse of children in an entirely separate category to other online crimes. Putting online child abuse in the same category with monetary white-washing, illegal gun and drug trading, or even funding terrorism is missing a key difference in the types of crimes and their effects.
On the other hand, the use online child exploitation in arguments for the regulation of online privacy tools can lead to cynicism among privacy advocates. "How can you possibly agree to a tool that enables child abuse?" is a simplistic argument used for monetary gain or greater control and surveillance. There is a mistrust of the intention behind the use of such a confronting and emotive topic in service of what appears to be a further reduction of our already limited online privacy, by both governments and companies.
Bandying the online child abuse argument back and forth between both sides risks normalising and trivialising the crimes themselves. I recommend watching the documentary film The Children in the Pictures (2021) as a wake-up call to the horrific realities of such crimes, and to help grasp the huge numbers of (mostly male) adults involved in creating and sharing materials depicting the sexual and physical abuse of children. In some cases recorded by the documentary makers, there were over 2 million or more users on a single dark web forum, and where one forum is taken down, another will appear. The film gives insight into the challenges involved in stopping online child exploitation and the importance of digital trails in catching the adults involved in such crimes.
Conclusions
We should continue to fight hard for tools that enable privacy online as we are used to having it in real life. While there have been wins for privacy, the general momentum is one of online privacy loss. But we should be careful to avoid falling into a trap of over-simplification in how we present our case. Unexamined superficial arguments backfire.
The superficiality lies in the too-easy dismissal of child abuse as a crime just like other crimes. It is not, because children are our dependents.
Finally, we should watch out for the normalisation of online abuse by using consumer terms like 'child pornography', or by flinging the topic back and forth in debate without stopping to think what online child abuse is.
Reducing risks
Here are a couple of reminders and ideas that may help reduce the risk of online exploitation and abuse happening to your children, or the children care for and know.
The first is the no-screens-in-the-bedroom rule. As a parent I know first hand how difficult it can be to apply this rule consistently—for example, where should your child study, now that most of the school curriculum is online?—but in raising my own children I have remained a firm believer in this rule. Keeping smartphones out of bedrooms and bathrooms, especially at night, reduces the risk of your child being blackmailed by a predatory adult into taking and sending sexualised photographs of themselves. It has other potential positive benefits as well.
The second is that keeping your child away from social media for as long as is reasonably possible should also help minimise the risk of younger children being subject to blackmail by adult predators, a process which often starts on social media. Of course, young people will need to learn how to be and behave online responsibly themselves, so throwing them in the deep end of all social media all-of-a-sudden when they turn 16 is not the right approach either. But a broad challenge to the commonly held view that access to smartphones and social media should be a given from a young age is necessary at this point. It is good to see that some governments are having discussions about age limitations for social media, though this is not a straight-forward issue either. Some children live in bad situations in real life and may find help online. I do believe such laws can empower parents to be more firm about home rules around screens and social media.
The third is to try to work hard and continuously on building a culture of openness with your child or those in your care. Children should know that they can talk to a trusted adult when they are in real difficulty, no matter how awkward or shameful the topic may be to them. I was shocked to learn that only a tiny proportion of children report online abuse and exploitation to an adult.
I'll end with this: social media companies need to be incentivised to take responsibility for the blackmailing of young people that takes place on their sites. Exploitation of children starts on mainstream social media platforms, a source of huge amounts of money for such companies.
Documentation
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