LEADING RESPONSIBLE TECH ORGANIZATION ALL TECH IS HUMAN PUBLISHES WHITE PAPER ON BALANCING PRIVACY AND CHILD SAFETY IN ENCRYPTED ENVIRONMENTS
All Tech Is Human, a leading Responsible Tech organization that unites stakeholders to solve complex problems, is today publishing Balancing Privacy and Child Safety in Encrypted Environments, an ecosystem-empowering white paper designed to empower child safety efforts. Discussions around balancing privacy, especially related to end-to-end encryption (E2EE), with concerns around child safety such as through the development and dissemination of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), has created a seemingly intractable impasse this paper works to tackle.
Balancing Privacy and Child Safety in Encrypted Environments is designed to help key stakeholders move past the current impasse through clear-eyed recommendations for policymakers, tech companies, and the larger Responsible Tech ecosystem of civil society organizations, researchers, and academics. The project involved interviewing 11 leading thinkers and professionals from a range of disciplines and perspectives to help understand competing values and best practices, and find opportunities for forward movement.
All Tech Is Human is uniquely positioned to help with this impasse. This paper, which is now available to download here, represents a multi-month effort to gather diverse expert stakeholder perspectives, and foster discussion, develop solutions, raise public awareness, and increase understanding of this unresolved challenge.
Key Recommendations to Help Solve Thorny Issues Around Privacy and Child Safety
The debate, privacy versus child safety, is often characterized as a binary one between child safety professionals and privacy professionals. That characterization is part of the problem, as we suffer from a collective failure across many borders to fully understand the interests and constraints of all stakeholders. These days, the most pressing challenge for discussion is that stakeholders have become distracted by arguments about technology and jargon rather than the impacts.
The policy stalemate between privacy and safety can be resolved, but it requires a nuanced, multi-faceted approach grounded in all of human rights law, with collaboration, and a shift away from longstanding adversarial mindsets. The issue is not black and white, and while there are significant challenges, there may be pathways forward that can balance both privacy and safety in digital spaces. Our recommendations include:
Promote user-driven reporting tools and prevention efforts
Leverage human rights law as a framework for resolution
Shift perspective and initial steps
Leverage lived experiences and including diverse voices
Address upstream choices and human vulnerabilities
Create a new framework for dialogue and exchange
Ultimately, we believe that the policy stalemate between privacy and safety is resolvable, but it requires a human rights-based approach, changing perspectives, and a willingness to engage in complex, nuanced conversations. By understanding the risks and needs of different user groups, re-evaluating platform monetization models, leveraging lived experiences, and addressing human vulnerabilities, stakeholders can develop balanced solutions that protect both privacy and safety in digital spaces. “A stalemate is not a solution, and the pressing concerns related to CSAM and other harms against children are far too great to be satisfied with stagnation,” says David Ryan Polgar, Founder and President of All Tech Is Human.
Why All Tech Is Human Is Positioned to Help With this Complex Problem
All Tech Is Human is a New York City-based nonprofit whose mission is to tackle the world’s thorniest tech & society issues through collective understanding, involvement, and action. Their work helps create a conducive environment for solving complex problems by serving as an agnostic sandbox for knowledge-sharing and collaboration. This is facilitated by creating a network of intelligence across multiple stakeholders, diversifying the disciplines and perspectives involved in the ecosystem, and creating an agile network that can move at the speed of tech.
In April, All Tech Is Human and Thorn released industry-leading Safety by Design principles for preventing the misuse of generative AI in furthering child sexual abuse. Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and more have publicly committed to the Safety by Design principles that stemmed from our working group which was led by Dr. Rebecca Portnoff, VP of Data Science at Thorn. The White House recently cited this work in their announcement around new private sector commitments designed to combat image-based harm.
Our wide range of activities center on community-building, educational resources, and career activities. The aim for our work is to have a collaborative and inclusive Responsible Tech ecosystem that is capable of solving complex problems by surfacing values, tensions, trade-offs, and best practices. This leads to consensus-building and collective action, which is the goal for Balancing Privacy and Child Safety in Encrypted Environments.
Download the paper | Learn more at AllTechIsHuman.org
MEDIA CONTACT
Josh Chapdelaine | Josh@AllTechIsHuman.org