Security of correspondence or safety of children? Alarming statistics from the USA

End-to-end encryption in WhatsApp and other Meta company products has drastically reduced the ability to receive signals about missing and endangered children, announced the American Organization for Combating Child Exploitation. The protection of correspondence in the world's most popular messenger and Meta's social networks has led to a decrease in the ability of human rights defenders and law enforcement to identify crimes.

This was reported by NBC.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in the US reported that the organization received about 29.2 million signals of possible child rights violations last year - 19% or 7 million fewer than the previous year. This is the largest reduction in the number of reports in the organization's history.

Online monitoring specialists at the National Center stated that the sharp decline in reports from technology companies, primarily from Meta, is associated with the widespread implementation of end-to-end encryption.

The National Center's chief legal counsel Yiota Souras told journalists that protecting the privacy of correspondence leads to the encryption of data on platforms where there are children and offenders.

According to the center's annual report, almost the entire decline was attributed to Meta - 6.9 million signals about children in trouble out of seven million. The company has been the leading informant for the National Center since at least 2019, and it currently accounts for about 67% of all reports.

Meta stated that it continues to work with the National Center and provides tools for creating reports "even in an encrypted environment."

The National Center has been operating since the early 2000s, and its reports are considered authoritative by child safety experts amid the growing problem of child exploitation on the internet, NBC reports.

The National Center told journalists that they noted a reduction in reports from Google, X, Discord, Microsoft, and cloud software development company Synchronoss. It's unclear what caused the reduction in the number of reports from these companies, but "every case of child exploitation that technology companies don't report comes at a high cost," specialists at the center reported.

Discord implemented end-to-end encryption for audio and video calls in September 2024. WhatsApp has remained the most downloaded messenger in the world since 2015.