Facebook encryption risks children’s safety, National Crime Agency warns
- Police could lose most of the reports they receive about children at risk on Facebook because of a move to encrypt the platform.
- It said Facebook’s owner Meta will not be able to spot key signs of abuse, and the alerts it gets from a US child safety hotline could reduce by 92%.
- When messages are encrypted, only the sender and receiver can read them.
- Meta said it would try to flag risky accounts using artificial intelligence.
- The National Crime Agency (NCA) is concerned that children go onto Facebook pretending to be adults, while paedophiles “masquerade as children” to get in contact with them.
- The NCA director general, Graham Biggar, stated that he wanted more people to go to prison for watching pictures and videos of child abuse.
- The NCA also wants the government to make it an offence to run a website to enable men to exchange child abuse images.
- For more, please visit the BBC News website.
Snapchat now lets subscribers share AI-generated snaps
- Snapchat Plus subscribers how have the ability to create images based on a text prompt and send them to friends.
- Those who subscribe to the $3.99 plan can use the feature by tapping the “AI” button from the toolbar on the right side of the camera interface.
- This opens a window where users can type a prompt or choose from one of the premade options.
- From there, Snapchat’s AI will spit out an image based on the prompt allowing users to edit and add a message before sending it off to friends and family on the app.
- Snapchat is rolling out other AI-powered tools for subscribers, including a way to make a subject of a photo appear farther away from the camera, by using AI to fill in the background.
- Users can try the feature by taking a close-up, pressing the “crop” icon in the camera interface, and selecting “extend.”
- For more, please visit The Verge website.
Belfast: Fake model agent who targeted children online jailed
- A man who posed as a model agent to persuade children and young women to send him sexually explicit images before threatening to share them online has been jailed for two years, and a further three years on licence.
- The judge reported that his offending had a profound impact on his “young and vulnerable” victims.
- Belfast Crown Court heard that one 12-year-old victim threatened to take her own life if he released a sexually explicit recording of her, to which he typed the reply: “Ha ha ha.”
- Other victims, include a 19-year-old woman who contacted police in May 2014 to say naked images of her had been posted online without her consent.
- The judge stated his criminality was “a nasty, planned and prolonged set of offences in which there was real harm willingly and knowingly caused to these victims over a lengthy period of time.”
- She added that the offending involving the 12-year-old were “particularly abhorrent.”
- He was also made subject of a SOPO (Sexual Offences Prevention Order) and placed on the sex offenders register for life.
- For more, please visit the BBC News website.
