Gwladys Laffitte 1:59 p.m., August 11, 2022
In May, the European Commission presented a project intended to prevent and combat sexual violence against children, by making it possible to oblige a platform or an online messaging system to detect pedophile content.
The European authorities in charge of the protection of personal data have expressed concern about the "risks" for privacy created by this project.
The European Commission wants to force platforms and messaging services, even encrypted ones like WhatsApp, to scan users' messages for possible child pornography content.
This could be photos, videos or even conversations of potential pedophiles who solicit minors.
Privacy impact concerns
In short, anything that could be tortious or criminal.
The platforms themselves must spot it, report it to the authorities, and remove it.
Except that would mean indiscriminately monitoring anyone's private conversations, without targeting.
And this is what worries the equivalent of the European CNIL: that there are errors and that people are wrongly accused because of artificial intelligence.
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The defenders of the project assure that a new European center would be created to precisely control everything that is reported by the platforms before being transmitted to the police.
In May, the European Commission presented a project aimed at preventing and combating sexual violence against children, by cracking down on the proliferation of child pornography images and videos and against the solicitation of children by paedophiles.