On Tuesday 7th March between 1500-16:30 CET at the Renaissance Brussels Hotel in Belgium, CyAN President Jean-Christophe Le Toquin, in his capacity as the Coordinator of Encryption Europe, will leverage his 20+ years of experience fighting against cybercrime and promoting image and video identification technology to advocate for strong encryption practices.
The European Commission published a proposal for a Regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse online in May 2022. The proposal obliges online service providers to detect, report and remove child sexual abuse on their services and it establishes a new independent EU Centre on Child Sexual Abuse.
Since its publication, the proposal ignited a strong debate on how to reconcile child safety without hampering privacy and fundamental rights. Industry stakeholders and privacy advocates have voiced criticism on how certain rules, such as detection obligations for messaging services, could undermine encryption technology and seriously impact user’s privacy. On the other hand, the European Commission and children rights champions call for a swift adoption of the Regulation pointing to the fact that the ePrivacy Derogation – which provides the legal basis for providers of messaging services to perform voluntary detection of CSAM – will expire in August 2024.
The objective of this EIF event will be to address some of the strategic questions of the proposal – such as the scope or the role of encryption in preserving privacy in communication messaging services – and encourage discussion on the most controversial aspects.