UK Edition
Tech giants allowed to give evidence to national child abuse inquiry in secret
Tech giants are being allowed to give evidence to the national child abuse inquiry in secret as they were accused of "having something to hide".
Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google will give parts of their testimonies to the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) this week behind closed doors after a series of restriction orders were imposed.
IICSA defended the move saying the redacted information could help sex offenders “evade detection” online if made public.
However, the rulings were criticised by MP Sarah Champion, who accused the tech companies of being worried about “being called out” on their “failing” to protect children.
The latest inquiry hearings come as Theresa May will tell a summit of world leaders in Paris this week that they should follow Britain’s lead in setting up a legal duty of care to protect people from online harms.
It was as Home Secretary in 2014 that Mrs May set up IICSA in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal to expose institutional failings to protect children across public life.
At the time, Mrs May said the inquiry would be conducted with “a presumption of maximum transparency”.
This week it emerged that Apple has been granted an application to hold a portion of its evidence later this week in a restricted session.
The company argued it was in the public interest to censor “sensitive information” that “may compromise its work in detecting and seeking to prevent further dissemination of child sexual abuse material, as well as identifying offenders of child sexual abuse.”
The other three tech companies appearing this week did not apply for restriction orders, however the inquiry’s chair, Professor Alexis Jay, ruled parts of their evidence should also be heard in private.
At today’s hearing Jacqueline Carey, counsel to the inquiry, said: “All witnesses are giving evidence in an open session, but it is necessary to have some closed sessions to allow the chair and the panel to hear evidence relating to sensitive matters that if published would enable offenders to evade detection.”
MP Sarah Champion, a Labour former shadow Home Office minister, told the Telegraph: “It raises alarm bells that they (the tech firms) are refusing to give evidence in the public domain – what have they got to hide?
"The conclusion I have to draw is that preventing child abuse is simply not a priority for tech companies and the reason they want to give evidence in private is they are worried being called out on this failing will impact on their bottom line.”
The criticism comes as tech giants are facing increasing pressure to be more transparent about the scale of child abuse on their services.
The Government has drawn up plans in its white paper to create an independent regulator with powers to demand internal information and data from online companies.
The proposals have been backed by children’s charities such as the NSPCC. Andy Burrows, NSPCC Head of Child Safety Online said: “Demanding greater transparency from social networks absolutely has to be one of the pillars of the Government’s forthcoming Online Harms legislation.
“That means requiring them to publish annual transparency reports and disclose information direct to the regulator on request, as well as proactively notifying the regulator of child safety failings and risks on their platforms.”
During yesterday’s hearing, Facebook appeared before inquiry’s panel and said it could not provide any figures for how many underage accounts it had detected in the UK nor how many registered sex offenders had been reported using its services.
Julie de Bailliencourt, the senior manager of Facebook’s Global Operations Team, defended Facebook’s efforts combating child abuse and grooming saying it had greatly increased its numbers of human moderators and was developing new technologies to detect such behaviour.
“I think we have demonstrated we are serious in being very aggressive and making our platform as inhospitable as possible to this type of behaviour,” she added.
During the hearing Ivor Frank, a barrister on the IICSA panel, suggested that if Facebook was unable to “guarantee” children’s safety that it should set aside $1 billion (£770 million) a year to compensate victims of abuse on their services.
Ms de Bailliencourt replied: “I don’t think I am the right person to comment on this. We have had a number of ideas and suggestions today, so I am taking notes and will relay that to the appropriate teams.”