The British government hopes to use parents’ fears of child predators in a new marketing campaign designed to undermine end-to-end encryption.
Rolling Stone writer James Ball broke the news on Saturday, reporting that the United Kingdom’s Home Office (the British equivalent of America’s Department of Justice) was planning “a multi-pronged publicity attack.” That attack launched today with the Home Office announcing its partnership with various charities in a “No Place to Hide” campaign that will “urge social media tech companies to put children’s safety first on their platforms.”
“Right now,” an ad for the “No Place to Hide Campaign” asserts, “some social media companies can detect online child sexual abuse and report it to law enforcement. But some companies plan to introduce end-to-end encryption, which will make this much harder.”
End-to-end encryption is a form of tech security that prevents anyone but the sender and recipient of electronic communications from seeing the information that is being transmitted. This prevents third parties from…
