Parliament and Council agree on temporary rules to remove online child abuse

EP and Council negotiators reached a provisional deal on new temporary legislation to avoid sexual exploitation of children online and make it easier to report.

The agreed changes provide for a derogation to the confidentiality of the communication and traffic data articles of the rules governing the privacy of electronic communications and enable the providers of web-based email, chats and messaging services to voluntarily detect, remove and report child sexual abuse online as well as to use scanning technologies to detect cyber grooming.

Online material linked to child sexual abuse is detected through specific technologies that scan the content, such as images and text, or traffic data. Hashing technology is used for images and videos to detect child sex abuse material, and classifiers and artificial intelligence are used to analyse text or traffic data to detect cyber grooming.

Parliament’s negotiators secured that national data protection authorities will have stronger oversight of the technologies used, an improved complaint and remedy mechanism, and that the processed data should be analysed by a person before being reported further. Service providers will also have to improve their reporting on statistics.

This temporary legislation should apply for a maximum of three years, or fewer should new permanent rules on tackling child sexual abuse online be agreed in the meantime.