Apple and Microsoft are not doing enough to protect children, the e-Safety Commissioner, an Australian regulator dealing with the protection of internet users, said.
According to commissioner Julie Inman Grant, the regulator made the tech giants share information about their methods of searching for child exploitation content and was not satisfied with the results. The companies admitted that they were not screening either their cloud services or video-chat service like Skype, Microsoft Teams and Face Time for child sexual abuse.
Representatives of Microsoft stressed that they are dedicated to preventing the proliferation of child abuse content.
"…as threats to children's safety continue to evolve and bad actors become more sophisticated in their tactics, we continue to challenge ourselves to adapt our response," the company's spokesman said.
Apple previously tried to introduce screening system that would scan personal cloud storages for child abuse content, but this move prompted harsh criticism from privacy advocates and human rights activists. They were concerned that such system may be used to search for political images and become a mechanism of censorship. Apple had to step away from this option.
However, the Australian commissioner believes that this was "a major step backwards from their responsibilities to help keep children safe." She stressed that tech giants must “protect the most vulnerable from the most predatory.”
According to Grant, Apple and Microsoft "do not even attempt to proactively detect previously confirmed child abuse material" despite the fact that Microsoft successfully developed a detection product that is used by law enforcers.
Facebook* recently found itself in the midst of a huge scandal over “bizarre, vulgar and upsetting searches.” Users complained that when they typed in the search bar “videos of” the site immediately suggested to search for “videos of child pornography.” Representatives of the company explained that these search predictions were a result of what people commonly search on the site and did not necessarily reflect the content of the platform.
* Facebook (Meta) is banned in Russia over extremism.