Priti Patel urges Meta to give up on end-to-end encryption plans

With end-to-end encryption enabled, the company would have been unable to hand the data to the police, even if they were in possession of a legally binding search warrant. But it would also be unable to monitor communications between users for other reasons, such as to find and report child abuse imagery being shared in direct messages.

In 2021, Facebook alone found and reported 22m pieces of child abuse imagery to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, a US nonprofit that coordinates responses to child abuse online. Instagram reported an additional 3.3m, and there are fears among activists that end-to-end encryption could bring those numbers plummeting down, representing many millions of instances of sharing of child abuse imagery disappearing from view.