eSafety reiterates call on tech giants to deploy more content scanning tools
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The news: Australia’s online safety regulator said that global tech giants like Apple, Google and Meta are not utilising scanning tools to detect child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) across enough of their services, following the release of eSafety’s latest transparency report.
The context: The report – covering the period between 15 June and 15 December – is the first of four that will be produced after the eSafety Commissioner issued periodic notices to Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Snap, Skype and WhatsApp in July 2024.
While the report notes that there has been “some progress”, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant claimed that “many of the same safety gaps and shortcomings we uncovered in our 2022 and 2023 reports still exist today without any meaningful or tangible action”.
eSafety highlighted that tools to detect CSEA on video call services like Apple’s FaceTime, Google Meet, Facebook Messenger and Microsoft’s Xbox Party Chats or Teams, among others, are not being deployed.
The regulator also said that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Snap and Skype did not proactively use tools to detect new CSEA material, while Apple, Google and WhatsApp did not block url links to known CSEA material on any part of their services.
However, the use of hash-matching – a system for detecting known CSEA material – has generally increased across Discord, Microsoft and WhatsApp. Discord has also started using language analysis tools to try and detect sexual extortion.
Microsoft and Snap also commenced using some detection tools on Xbox and Snapchat during the relevant period.
Inman Grant also flagged that Apple and YouTube “didn’t even answer our questions about how many user reports they received about child sexual abuse on their services or details of how many Trust & Safety personnel Apple and Google have on-staff.”
Under the periodic notice, the eight tech companies are required to report every six months for a two-year period on how they are implementing the Basic Online Safety Expectations.
What they said: "It is clear to me that during the last two to three years since we asked these companies how they are tackling online child sexual abuse, they haven’t taken many steps to lift and improve their efforts here, despite the promise of AI to tackle these harms and overwhelming evidence that online child sexual exploitation is on the rise," Inman Grant said.
The source: eSafety Commissioner media release
