Your Daily Broadsheet

The UK government has announced that it is funding five projects to snoop on your device content supposedly in a quest to seek out child porn. But surely these technologies will have wider usage.

The five projects are the winners of the Safety Tech Challenge Fund, which aims to encourage the tech industry to find practical solutions to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse online, without impacting people's rights to privacy and data protection in their communications.

The winners will each receive an initial £85,000 from the Fund, which is administered by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Home Office, to help them bring their technical proposals for new digital tools and applications to combat online child abuse to the market.

Based across the UK and Europe, and in partnership with leading UK universities, the winners of the Safety Tech Challenge Fund are:

• Edinburgh-based Cyan Forensics and Crisp Thinking, in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and Internet Watch Foundation, will develop a plug-in to be integrated within encrypted social platforms. It will detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM) - by matching content against known illegal material.
• SafeToNet and Anglia Ruskin University will develop a suite of live video-moderation AI technologies that can run on any smart device to prevent the filming of nudity, violence, pornography and CSAM in real-time, as it is being produced.
• GalaxKey, based in St Albans, will work with Poole-based Image Analyser and Yoti, an age-assurance company, to develop software focusing on user privacy, detection and prevention of CSAM and predatory behavior, and age verification to detect child sexual abuse before it reaches an E2EE environment, preventing it from being uploaded and shared.
• DragonflAI, based in Edinburgh, will also work with Yoti to combine their on-device nudity AI detection technology with age assurance technologies to spot new indecent images within E2EE environments.
• T3K-Forensics are based in Austria and will work to implement their AI-based child sexual abuse detection technology on smartphones to detect newly created material, providing a toolkit that social platforms can integrate with their E2EE services.

Since August, EFF and others have been telling Apple to cancel its new child safety plans . Apple is now changing its tune about one component of its plans: the Messages app will no longer send notifications to parent accounts.

That's good news. As we've previously explained , this feature would have broken end-to-end encryption in Messages, harming the privacy and safety of its users. So we're glad to see that Apple has listened to privacy and child safety advocates about how to respect the rights of youth. In addition, sample images shared by Apple show the text in the feature has changed from "sexually explicit" to "naked," a change that LBTQ+ rights advocates have asked for, as the phrase "sexually explicit" is often used as cover to prevent access to LGBTQ+ material.

Now, Apple needs to take the next step, and stop its plans to scan photos uploaded to a user's iCloud Photos library for child sexual abuse images (CSAM). Apple must draw the line at invading people's private content for the purposes of law enforcement. As Namrata Maheshwari of Access Now pointed out at EFF's Encryption and Child Safety event , "There are legislations already in place that will be exploited to make demands to use this technology for purposes other than CSAM." Vladimir Cortés of Article 19 agreed, explaining that governments will "end up using these backdoors to ... silence dissent and critical expression." Apple should sidestep this dangerous and inevitable pressure, stand with its users, and cancel its photo scanning plans.

Apple: Pay attention to the real world consequences, and make the right choice to protect our privacy.

Young people in Russia have been jailed for posting sexually suggestive images of themselves online in front of well-known landmarks.

There have been reports of at least 4 cases in the past week where police have investigated, detained, or jailed young people for posting suggestive images of themselves in front of the Kremlin walls, St. Basil's Cathedral, St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersberg, and next to an eternal flame commemorating the history of the 2nd world war.

One young couple was jailed for 10 months for supposedly insulting believers' feelings by taking an image suggestive of oral sex outside the famous domes of Moscow's St. Basil's Cathedral. Blogger Ruslan Bobiev and his girlfriend, influencer Anastasia Chistova staged a photoshoot that showed her on her knees in front of the cathedral wearing a police jacket. This was apparently the first time that such charges have led to actual jail time. After the hearing last week Bobiev has subsequently been ordered to be deported back to his native Tajikistan.

Cases that date back to August have seen women detained for flashing bare breasts and buttocks in front of monuments and landmarks, although many of whom protest their innocence stating that they were not responsible for the images being posted online. Last week a model was compelled to publicly apologise for a 3-year-old photograph of herself kissing another woman in front of the Eternal Flame monument saying that it was made without the goal to offend or defile.

A French court on Friday, has rejected a claim brought by two children's campaigns calling for the blocking of major porn websites in France.

The judge rejected the claim because the court facing time pressures had not been able to hear arguments from the sites' publishers.

The anti-porn campaigners had hoped for the blocking of nine top porn sites, including PornHub and Xvideos.

One of the ISPs being asked to censor the porn, Orange, noted that it already offered tools such as parental controls to limit children's access to online pornography.

Samuel Comblez of e-Enfance, one of the children's campaigners, said: It's not a completely lost battle, adding that it was now examining other ways to restrict access to the sites.