2024-01-28 07:29:00
Erem News
The technology giant, Meta, revealed a new feature planned to help protect teenagers from inappropriate images in their messages. It also announced the introduction of a package of restrictions on direct messages via Instagram and Facebook to prevent people from messaging teenagers without a request.
After criticism from governments and child protection organizations about the end-to-end encryption of the Messenger application, which was implemented by Meta some time ago, which limits the ability to read messages only between the sender and the recipient, the company said that it will launch later this year, a new security tool to prevent children from receiving images. The tool will likely be optional and also available to adults on Instagram and Facebook.
sexual harassment
According to Meta, the new feature is designed solely to protect users, especially women and teenage girls. It also announced that minors would by default not be able to receive messages on Instagram and Messenger from strangers. It is noteworthy that recently, as part of an American lawsuit against Meta, company documents indicated that an estimated 100,000 teenage users on Facebook and Instagram are exposed to sexual harassment online every day. It is worth noting that other messaging applications such as iMessage from Apple, Signal, and WhatsApp, owned by Meta, already have this technology to protect children.
Some critics, however, say platforms should deploy a technology called client-side scanning to detect child abuse via encrypted messaging. This technology refers to software on a user’s device that scans messages for matches with images of known child abuse before encrypting and sending them, flagging and reporting any suspected illegal content. But according to Meta, its new feature is not similar to client-side scanning, which it believes undermines a key privacy-protecting feature of encryption; Because the program will only use machine learning to identify nudity and identify child abuse; This is so difficult that there would be a high risk of errors if this was attempted with billions of users.
Instead Meta will use a range of systems to protect children that do not undermine privacy, including systems that identify adults behaving suspiciously, prevent them from interacting with people under 18 or find and follow other suspicious adults, and prevent adults from contacting Minors, through measures that limit the ability of people over the age of 18 to send messages to teens who do not follow them.
Meta indicates that it has provided more than 30 tools and resources to help keep children safe, and announced that by default, children will not be able to receive messages from people they do not follow or are not in contact with. Under this new default setting, teens can only be messaged or added to group chats by people they already follow or are connected to.
Parental supervision tools will also give parents the ability to reject teens’ requests to change their default security settings, such as who can direct messages to them or whether they can view more sensitive content, whereas previously only parents were notified of the change.
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