In a letter to Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, the governments of the US, Britain and Australia have asked the company to implement the announced expansion of encryption on Facebook if not without a backdoor for law enforcement agencies. This is important to protect children from violence and sexual abuse, according to the document.
In 2018 alone, Facebook has provided nearly 17 million reports to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which deals with cases of possible child abuse. The implementation of the encryption plans, so appreciate the NCMEC, but could be omitted 70 percent of these instructions. The fight against terrorism, governments say, is made more difficult by Facebook's plan.
Zuckerberg had announced in the spring that Facebook wants to expand the use of encryption strong. Thus Facebook's chat services WhatsApp and Messenger as well as the communication function of the photo service Instagram are to be switched to a common technical platform with so-called end-to-end encryption. WhatsApp already comes with end-to-end encryption as standard, but it can be used by the messenger for confidential chats.
In the case of end-to-end encryption, the contents of communication are basically only visible to sender and recipient in plain text. Even Facebook would no longer have access to the content. For example, forbidden or problematic content could not be detected, for example, with the help of analysis software. For users, the function guarantees privacy in their chats.
User hints become more important
Facebook had announced in the spring, before the implementation of the plan first extensive consultations with authorities to lead. Messenger chief Stan Chudnovsky said back then, they would have to rely more on evidence from users to combat illegal content.
Currently, Facebook and other services maintain databases in which posted images with illegal content such as child pornography are recorded in order to prevent their dissemination. A kind of fingerprint of a picture is created and stored, newly uploaded contents are compared with this "hash". A suggestion to use the method even with full encryption, for example, is to match content via the apps directly on the device of users before they are encrypted for transmission.
Zuckerberg: Advantages of encryption outweigh
Mark Zuckerberg admitted to staff this Thursday that encryption is a challenge for public authorities, akin to fighting with a tied-up hand. At the same time, Facebook is convinced that encryption benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
The tech companies emphasize that encryption protects, for example, private data of users from online criminals. They fundamentally reject the installation of backdoors, as this would reduce the safety for all users. After all, backdoors firmly implemented in products could not only be used by investigators, but also by criminals. That would no longer be effective encryption.
