Last month, the Home Office published its long awaited strategy for tackling child sexual abuse, with an emphasis on working closer with tech companies to go after the vast majority of offenders who use the internet to groom and abuse children.
The upcoming Online Safety Bill will force a duty of care on tech firms, legally compelling them to do more to protect children on their sites.
But it comes in the wake of a decision by Facebook to switch off some of its child abuse detection tools in Europe in response to new rules from the EU.
At the time of that decision in December, the company said it had no choice but to do so, since the new privacy directive banned automatic scanning of private messages.
In a blog post, Facebook said: “The safety of our community is paramount, and we are advocating for changes that will allow us to resume our efforts to identify this type of material.”
Some other firms, including Microsoft, have not made such changes, arguing the most responsible approach is to keep the technology functioning.
The NSPCC said the Facebook decision was a clear break from the rest of the industry which committed to continue scanning until clarifying legislation could be agreed in Brussels.
The charity said it feared the decision by Facebook could be a “pretext to rolling out end-to-end encryption” across its messaging platforms.
Law enforcement officials and child safety experts have long warned that end-to-end encryption without safeguards in place to protect children would seriously hamper efforts to tackle online abuse.
Mr Burrows said: “It’s astonishing that at this time of heightened risk, instead of making every effort to combat these crimes, some tech firms seem to be paving the way for abuse to go unchecked with commercial decisions that trade off children’s safety and put them at even greater risk.
“The government’s upcoming Online Safety Bill comes at a crucial time. It can lead to ground-breaking protections for children if it gives the regulator the power and agility to hold tech firms accountable if their design choices make their platforms unsafe.”
The National Crime Agency (NCA) has assessed that there are at least 300,000 people posing a sexual threat to children in the UK, many of them using online sites to reach youngsters.
Over a six-month period after the first lockdown began last April, the NCA and police forces across the country made 4,760 arrests of suspected child sexual offenders.
During that same six-month period, more than 6,500 children were identified and safeguarded by authorities.
