No Place to Hide campaign aims to halt end-to-end encryption

The United Kingdom new campaign called No Place to Hide asks tech companies to halt their end-to-end protection protocol on social media platforms to help the law enforcement official track down child abuse and exploitation.

End-to-end protection is already existing in certain social media platforms, and will be adopted by other medias including Facebook Messenger, Instagram and others to deliver increased privacy. End-to-end encryption will allow only the sender and receiver the privilege to view the messages, and not the service provider or other bodies won’t be able to look at the conversation.

UK based campaign No Place to Hide and its purpose

The campaign No Place to Hide, may benefit children as it will allow law enforcement agencies to look into social media conversation identifying child abuse and harassment. As of now there are 14 million reports of child sexual abuse that is being registered online, and these could have massive hit when end-to-end encryption is employed. Furthermore, this privacy improvement could benefit the citizens in general but it will take a massive toll on child safety.

However, No Place to Hide isn’t completely against end-to-end encryption, but their steps may things difficult for tech firms to proceed with the same.  The campaign asks tech firms to ensure they can protect children and prove that the encryption protocol that will be adopted by them will not risk child safety. So companies must define their encryption in such a way that it will keep child safety in mind and do their best to offer the same while encrypting conversations.

Privacy or child safety – A question that is tough to answer

The campaign is largely funded by the UK government followed by charities, survivors and safety-tech companies. As  per the Rolling Stone report around $725,000 is allocated for the campaign. On the other hand, Big Brother Watch, a UK civil liberties group has responded that this campaign is only to wider the surveillance on private conversations.

This is a debatable topic, as both privacy and safety are important to citizens. However, we at The Cybersecurity Times believe that there could be an alternative formula to mitigate the situation as child safety is even more important than privacy. As safety is basic need for anyone, while privacy is definetly not a necessity but a right. Tech firms can look for alternate means to handle the situation, and we hope they will.

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