These days I don’t often write blogs which praise what internet businesses do, particularly if they are doing it on a voluntary basis. Makes me smell a rat. What are they really up to? What regulatory threat are they trying to fend off or blunt? Too many scars and disappointments. Hopes dashed, trust betrayed. But sometimes you just have to step back and say “well done”.
In this instance that’s what I’m doing. I am speaking about the Tech Coalition’s initiative in the shape of Project Lantern.
The initial participating companies in Project Lantern include Discord, Google, Mega, Meta, Quora, Roblox, Snap, and Twitch. That’s a great start particularly as these businesses are generally at each other’s throats in the marketplace.
I am pretty sure even under the UK’s Online Safety Act there would be no requirement for the industry to come together in this way and deliver something like Lantern. Why? Because the focus of the Act, indeed the focus of much associated legislation around privacy and safety, is on the behaviour of individual companies and platforms whereas Lantern is an example of collaboration by and between platforms and companies.
This blog is going to be unusual in another way. Most of it is going to be quotes from someone else. In this case the Tech Coalition.
Signal sharing
What the participating companies have agreed to do is share intelligence about suspect activity on their site or services.
The focus is on threats to children, for example online grooming or financial sextortion.
How do the threats emerge? To quote the Tech Coalition, typically the perpetrators will connect with a child on an open platform or service then
“….direct their victims to private chats and different platforms to solicit and share child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or coerce payments by threatening to share intimate images with others.”
Here are the other key things you need to know about Lantern
“Because this activity spans across platforms, in many cases, any one company can only see a fragment of the harm facing a victim. To uncover the full picture and take proper action, companies need to work together. Lantern is a groundbreaking initiative that brings together technology companies to securely and responsibly share signals about activity and accounts that violate their policies against child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA). Signals can be, for example, information tied to policy-violating accounts like email addresses, usernames, CSAM hashes, or keywords used to groom as well as buy and sell CSAM. Signals are not definitive proof of abuse – they offer clues for further investigation and can be the crucial piece of the puzzle that enables a company to uncover a real-time threat to a child’s safety.”
I am pleasantly surprised the usual suspects in the privacy world have not objected to any of this. Maybe I just need to give them more time. Or do they think the initiative will not amount to much as end-to-end encryption makes further inroads?
Next steps?
How will the processes which this initiative anticipates emerge and develop in the coming period? What, concretely, will it deliver, particularly if the platforms children are moved to or which they move between follow the trend towards greater deployment of end-to-end encryption?
Will people think it is OK for platforms to say they are doing what they can, where they can, when increasing numbers of people realise so much of what is going on is intentionally hidden from them by the very same companies now waving a lantern? Will people think they are talking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time?
A real world check
Will fewer children end up being abused? Will more perpetrators get arrested? Or will we instead simply count an increasing number of victims while fewer and fewer perpetrators are brought to justice because law enforcement and the courts are powerless to bring the culprits to justice, thanks to the wider deployment of encryption?
If that is the result of this experiment with encryption, it won’t last long and those who thought otherwise will have to explain themselves.
I am standing sentinel.
Watch this space.
Desiderata 