Commissioners’ recommendations for tech companies include measures criticised on privacy grounds.
Australia’s Internet Watchdog accuses tech giants, including Google and Apple of failing to take action against child sexual abuse on its platform.
In a report released Wednesday, Esafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said the Tech Platform could not implement various measures to protect children, including scanning cloud services for known abuse materials and using language analysis tools to detect sexually abusive trieds in messaging services.
Grant said either Google-owned Apple and YouTube were unable to track reports of child sexual abuse and could not say how long it took them to respond to reports they received.
“When you leave it to your device, these companies do not prioritize child protection and appear to be turning a blind eye to the crimes that are occurring in the services,” Grant said in a statement.
“We need to maintain pressure across the tech industry to meet their responsibility in order to protect the most vulnerable members of society from the most severe forms of harm, which is what these regular notifications are designed to encourage.”
Grant added that since he was asked three years ago “despite his commitment to addressing these harms and addressing overwhelming evidence that online child sexual exploitation is on the rise,” businesses have taken few steps to improve their efforts.”
“Other consumer industries are not licensed to operate by enabling such heinous crimes against children in facilities and services,” she said.
Google disputes the findings of the report, saying it is rooted in “reporting metrics rather than online safety performance,” with over 99% of YouTube abused materials being automatically removed before flagging them.
“Child safety is important to us,” a Google spokesperson said.
“We have been leading the industry’s battle against child sexual abuse material since day one, and have invested heavily in advanced technology to actively find and remove this harmful content.”
Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Snap, and Discord were also included in the report, but did not respond to requests for comment.
Tom Sulston, policy director for Digital Rights Watch, said it is important for authorities to take action against online child abuse, but some of the tools supported by the Internet Watchdog will raise serious civil liberties and privacy concerns.
Sulston said scanning for live calls and private messages requires a platform to abandon end-to-end encryption, which prevents communication from being seen by anyone except the sender and receiver.
“It is a serious invasion of privacy for all those who use the service completely innocently and reasonably,,” Surston told Al Jazeera.
“It also has a dangerous knock-on effect in which users of the service are subject to surveillance from hostile actors, foreign governments, criminals and hackers, a major risk for civil society, activists, journalists and those who communicate on the Internet.
Breaking the encryption would be “disproportionate and dangerous,” Suruston added.
“We don’t expect the post office to open all the letters and read illegal content. In fact, most countries have laws against this,” he said.
