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Representatives from the AFP’s child exploitation counter unit have claimed during a parliamentary inquiry that anonymising technology used by social media platforms helps perpetrators.
The Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation revealed that while social media platforms can work with law enforcement to report and combat online abuse, their end-to-end encryption tech is obstructing efforts to protect children from exploitation online.
AFP Commander Hilda Sirec said that advances in technology should be made in terms of security first and profit second as perpetrators were using new technologies on the platforms to commit crimes anonymously.
“Tech companies are expected to innovate and provide technological advances so their customer base has better user experience,” she said.
“They want to help law enforcement but also have a customer base they are trying to enhance.”
In the last financial year, the ACCC received 22,600 reports of possible child exploitation online.
Of those reports, the organisation referred 591 to investigations which resulted in 235 alleged perpetrators facing more than 2700 charges, the committee heard.
ACCC Assistant Commissioner Lesa Gale says while the scale of child exploitation offences is big on the clear net, it’s even bigger on the dark web where criminals can use the shield of anonymity.
“The challenge globally remains the anonymising technologies and our ability to be able to identify those offenders operating on these platforms,” she said.
“We often encounter challenges in retention periods of the information held by (platforms) and it makes it very difficult when we can’t access information to further an investigation.”
Commissioner Gale told the committee that education was key to prevention and parents needed to have honest, regular conversations with their children about what they are doing and seeing online.
“Sadly, it doesn’t take much at all for a perpetrator to groom a child in an online environment and we regularly see examples of children being groomed in a matter of minutes, often while their parents are in the room,” she said.
“That’s the nature of this offending and how perpetrators will exploit this technology to access, groom and ultimately offend against children.”
This article was first published on Public Spectrum
Eliza Sayon is an experienced writer who specialises in corporate and government communications. She is the content producer for Public Spectrum, an online knowledge-based platform for and about the Australian public sector.
