Donna Jones, Chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and Police and Crime Commissioner for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, is calling for tech companies to prioritise the safety of children over the privacy of their users.
Concerns have been raised by technology experts and leading child abuse charities that end-to-end encryption on private messages could be used to conceal child abuse online. Leaders are calling for social media platforms to provide assurance that they will keep their platforms safe from abusers.
In response, PCC Donna Jones said:
“Protecting children and vulnerable people is the first job of any government. The new Online Safety Bill was passed on Tuesday this week, meaning it is now law.
“This brings greater protection for children, putting the onus on social media companies to check the minimum age of users and to ensure that targeted content is age appropriate. Breaches of the new laws will see social media companies paying large fines. I’m pleased to have worked with the government on the creation of this new law but acknowledge that this is just the start.
“Parents need to ensure they know what their children are doing online. There is more threat from harm for a child sitting in their bedroom with a phone than walking down the road alone.
“The National Crime Agency has mapped there are over 700,000 individuals accessing and viewing indecent images of children online. That’s one in 70 people in this country. This is a huge risk and one which police forces across the country are working hard to combat.
“The safety of our children online must come above any privacy concerns for users and we must see social media platforms stepping up to implement safeguards at every opportunity.”
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The Online Safety Bill passed its final Parliamentary debate on 19 September and is now ready to become law. The Bill takes a zero-tolerance approach when it comes to protecting children online, meaning social media platforms will be legally responsible for the content that they host, and they will be expected to remove illegal content quickly or prevent it from appearing in the first place.
The people they want to catch will just go deeper underground and use alternative systems. It will not protect children.
The bill will break end-to-end encryption, opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages of friends, family members, employees, executives, journalists, human rights activists and even politicians themselves. And that is what they want it. They will start with using it to spy on the unions and environmental activists. But then it’ll be extended to other fringe groups that are not breaking any law but have ideas the government does not like, such as the anti monarchists. You are being treated as a criminal before you do any wrong.
I bet your a bad guy. I let the police read all my messages. I have nothing to hide. I don’t rock the boat. I’m not gay. I don’t vote for unions. I think the politicians are great and the police should have more power.
Prioritising your diet might be more productive, and healthier too!!
Lead by example, why don’t you?
parents can also control what children have access to, but that would mean parents actually being parents, instead of being so weak and lazy, that they need a nanny state to do it for them.
the online safety bill is about the state trying to control what people see and say online and using the child element as the headline distraction from the real purpose, which is to shut down or control dissenting views from the state peddled narrative
The only people to blame is the parent’s lack of education on the subject and the lack of interest they have in the child’s life
The whole purpose of the online safety bill is the surveillance and censorship of the general public using the excuse of ‘safety’ to do it – a poisonous piece of authoritarian legislation that the state and all it woke tendrils will be eagerly using against us all if we dare question its agenda
I’m sure Musk and Zuckerberg are shaking in their boots now that the CPP is involved .. still no visible Police walking the streets.. Crime going up .. not down ..
The real purpose of the online safety bill has very little to do with child safety. Hard to imagine any instrument more Orwellian.