Why would a child sign up for an E2E app where it’s easier for paedophiles to anonymously groom them? Sophisticated organised criminals don’t use Facebook Messenger, but this article isn’t about them.
Paedophiles too – they target children on unencrypted social media sites. The victims have no desire to switch to a more secure platform, but if Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat were to become secure by default then those companies would stop sending law enforcement a continual stream of unsophisticated paedophiles to investigate. Many of them even use emails and IP addresses that are trivially linked to their real identities.
Other than closing the Internet as someone suggests, wouldn't be possible to integrate the service that Microsoft offers to detect this material?
Other apps like telegram, not e2e, could be integrated more easily, but personally I wouldn't mind such system being native on Android or IOS - allowing to make life much more difficult for pedos.
So this is against pedophiles whatsapp groups or what? This is absolutely bizarre inefficient solution.
They can't destroy tor pedo sites, or stop them from sending data in archive with passwords? These people are willingy inserting spyware into phones while constantly harrasing big tech for this.
Clown world.
>Finally, what happens when nefarious individuals realize it's super easy to pick up rich people's children by pretending to be a Boost driver?
This is where my company's app, Mooble, comes in.
Mooble is a breakthrough anti-molestation app built for modern, on the go kids. By simply pressing a button or speaking a programmable safety word, Mooble broadcasts an emergency alert through all of the child's linked social networks.
Even if the alleged crimes allegedly abused the app (something certainly not endorsed by the app makers), the same can be said for a lot of other apps. Thieves use facebook to look for people who give details on when they are on vacation for example. Snapchat and Skype and kik and whatapp and every other social messaging and social media app and service is abused by pedo criminals grooming their victims. etc
But those alleged crimes could not have possibly helped by the app, as has been pointed out: you don't get to see individual officers' locations and it does not show areas with no police at all either, just police hotspots (and technically, most areas even in a dense city like Hong Kong are without immediate police presence most of the time, anyway).
But even if we played devil's advocate and took the allegations of criminal activity that abused the app at face value, and assumed Tim Cook is not free to share specifics as the information might be confidential, he could at least answer what local laws were allegedly violated by the app itself. Those laws certainly are not confidential information.
"Last week the NSPCC said 52% of online child sex crimes in England and Wales were committed over Facebook-owned apps"
They mean 52% of the known crimes.
Stalkers and rapists don't need these tools to ply their 'trade', they're fine with existing resources. New resources such as the app in question do not magically turn normal people into stalkers and rapists.
Stalkerware is no joke. It's more ubiquitous than people realize and it can effectively ruin someone's life. Even when these tools are used for their intended purpose, I personally find their abilities borderline creepy when employed against kids beyond a certain age.
It's not just trafficking victims either. Abusive partners with a modicum of technical skills can make their victims' life hell through these apps. There are organizations and sites out there (https://stopstalkerware.org/) but they can't always help you if you're completely powerless.
Any intelligent criminal will just meet face-to-face to discuss their criminal activities. None of these apps protect against someone taking a photo of the screen and snitching to the authorities about what was said in exchange for less jail time.
My guess: Client-side scan for certain keywords to identify grooming and some kind of signature-based identification of known child-porn media. Basically what I assume Messenger does today, but on the local devices instead.
The general public won't care until we're halfway down a slippery slope, and then people will just switch to whatever platform is perceived as more secure/popular at that particular moment in time.
It's already there, in the third paragraph of the article:
“This is a very bad idea,” said Cathy Lanier, chief of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, in an interview. Smartphone communication is “going to be the preferred method of the pedophile and the criminal. We are going to lose a lot of investigative opportunities.”
> The practice typically involves offenders sending an unsolicited sexual image to people via social media or dating apps, but can also be over data sharing services such as Bluetooth and Airdrop.
I'd wager the majority of cases they refer to being via social media and dating apps given the language.
We all understand that a sex offender is low on our list of people we care most about, But taking such a medieval, and profiteering approach like this app, Doesn't make us much better than the offenders.
The authorities are already aware of where these people are, The target audience here being only those who feel threatened, or scared, to know these people might live nearby, But that chance has always been there.
I feel this app can only serve to boost paranoia within the public mind.
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