Facebook chiefs were urged to think again about encrypting messaging as it risks making it harder to catch “paedophiles” preying on children online.
Schools Standards Minister Damian Hinds issued the plea amid fears from police chiefs that the move could lead to thousands fewer reports of alleged online child abuse a year.
He told GB News: “The ability to find and intercept paedophiles operating on the internet is a really important part of law enforcement activity.
“It’s not a question about privacy, it’s not about people’s emails or messages being read.
“It’s about being able to detect when there is child abuse imagery effectively being propagated around the internet.
“When you have this type of encryption, if it stops that, that’s a problem.”
The National Crime Agency reportedly estimates that around nine out of ten referrals that it receives from Facebook and 85 per cent of those from Instagram will no longer be passed on to police once encryption is rolled out.
Rob Jones, NCA director-general of operations, told The Times that it had lobbied Facebook’s parent company Meta not to make the encryption changes and suggested the decision was based on “profitability”.
He would advise parents to consider “very carefully” about whether to let their children on encryted platforms.
He added “The net impact is that the platform is not as safe as it was for children because nobody knows what’s going on in there.
"Children are masquerading as adults because there’s no effective age verification and paedophiles are masquerading as children to establish relationships and grooming potential victims.”
But Meta argued encryption protects users from criminals including hackers and fraudsters.
A spokesman said: "We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have developed robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.
"Our recently published report detailed these measures, such as restricting over 19s from messaging teens who don’t follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour."
Mr Hinds added that historically Meta had co-operated well with the Government on online safety.
