Out of more than 69 million child sex abuse images discovered on line last year, 94% were found on Facebook, Sky News reports. This is especially scary for law enforcement officials as the social media company is working on ways to improve privacy and encryptions for its users which would make it next to impossible to find the sex traffickers.
UK authorities say that as many as 6,000 children were saved from traffickers in the one year period from June 2019 to June 2020. But once Facebook implements new encryptions for its Messenger and Instagram aps, it might not be possible for authorities to track the victims any longer.
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Robert Jones of England’s National Crime Agency told Sky, “What we risk losing with these changes is the content, which gives us the intelligence leads to pursue those offenders and rescue those children.”
“The end-to-end encryption model that’s being proposed takes out of the game one of the most successful ways for us to identify leads, and that layers on more complexity to our investigations, our digital media, our digital forensics, our profiling of individuals and our live intelligence leads, which allow us to identify victims and safeguard them.”
So here we have the classic example of what happens when the general public’s right to privacy conflicts with fighting crime. It’s like when on every cop show ever the police detectives complain that they can’t gather the evidence needed for a conviction because their hands are tied by court decisions limiting their ability to conduct searches without a warrant.
Civil libertarians would say that this is the price of freedom and privacy in a democracy. But other would say that if the technology keeps advancing then the providers of said tech have a moral obligation to do whatever they can to help catch the worst offenders such as child abusers and sex traffickers.
And Facebook Moderators have now been told to return to work at their offices. These are the outsourced people employed by Accenture contractors working for Facebook on community operations and product data operations, BuzzFeed reports. The move comes as regular Facebook employees have been told not to return to their offices before July, 2021.
So once again the people who are forced to work as independent contractors get the shaft.
“No written documentation, HR is hit-or-miss when it comes to addressing the numerous and varied concerns of the employees, and people are scared. Truly and understandably scared,” wrote one Accenture contractor on Thursday on an internal Facebook message board. “How can we possibly be ready to return to the office when this entire process has been so utterly and completely mishandled?”
“Since March, we’ve increased our use of technology and enabled an overwhelming majority of our reviewers to work from home,” Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois told BuzzFeed News. “But considering some of the most sensitive content can’t be reviewed from home, we’ve begun allowing reviewers back into some of our sites as government guidance has permitted.”
