Encryption’s role in our lives and its impact on the safety of children online is a significant issue.
In some countries, law enforcement has called to ban encryption to protect children from potential harm caused by child abusers. While addressing this concern is crucial, the approach of banning or disabling encryption creates other risks for young people online.
Policymakers and other stakeholders have approached the Internet Society seeking alternative solutions to security-compromising methods such as client-side scanning or encryption backdoors. In response to this, we have collaborated with child safety experts to develop various resources to help encryption and online child safety advocates contribute to public discussions and strive for a more balanced approach to addressing this issue.
The Online Child Safety Expert Working Group
We created the Online Child Safety Expert Working Group (OCSEWG) to bring together experts to discuss how to approach solutions to online harms, including the safeguards provided through encryption.
The group, consisting of volunteer experts in encryption and online child safety, came together to develop a concise and accessible paper—Encryption is a Preventative Tool that Protects Children—which describes how encryption helps keep children safe online and on their devices. Internet Society staff facilitated working group meetings and coordinated the contributions of the experts while refraining from contributing content themselves to ensure that the evidence shared was solely informed by experts in the field of child safety.
We are eager to share the findings in the hope of contributing to the larger conversation about the role of encryption in child safety. The paper describes how encryption plays a crucial role in safeguarding children in the following ways:
- Encryption protects children’s information and privacy online, preventing it from being exposed to cybercriminals.
- Encryption helps protect children from abuse and neglect by supporting child protection agencies in handling sensitive information and protecting children who need to remain anonymous due to the risk of retaliation or further abuse. Because sometimes, the ones closest to children are the ones they most need protection from.
- Encryption enables children to have agency, giving them the freedom to explore sensitive topics that are important to them without fear of surveillance or interference. Topics such as religion, family, sexual health, reproductive health, and others are increasingly important for young people to learn about and research in privacy.
This document was developed through a highly collaborative effort. Working group members worked diligently to address important issues concerning child safety online and encryption. The working group agreed on the final messages, finding common ground on a topic that many others have failed to agree on.
We will continue working to educate the public about the importance of online safety for children. For example, at this year’s Global Encryption Day, we will further explore and share the Parent’s Guide to Encryption—a resource we developed for the Global Encryption Coalition. The larger topics of encryption and children’s safety online will continue to grow in importance as new technologies emerge and new policies are proposed around the world.
We will continue to support encryption as one of the fundamental tools of the Internet to ensure a safe online experience. While there are nefarious people who use the Internet to harm children, policy and technical responses to this issue must be based on expert evidence to be effective and proportionate.
We must address the behaviors of those who seek to harm children online without dismantling encryption, which is one of the most important tools we have to keep children safe.