On Wednesday, a court in LA County found Meta — the parent company of Facebook — liable in the endangerment of children on its platform.

It was the second major defeat for Meta in as many days.

The day before, a landmark $375 million ruling against Meta in New Mexico had already given a new sense of urgency to the ongoing global showdown between child safety and privacy advocates. 

Meta was found liable on all counts — including the central allegation of that case, that child endangerment was baked into the very design of Meta platforms. 

It was a total defeat for the tech giant.

At the heart of the debate is the question of encryption: Can adults enjoy the peace of mind afforded by snooping-free communications, without allowing child predators to take advantage of the same technology? 

Part of this allegation related to Meta’s personalized algorithms, which in the words of one Meta engineer-turned-whistleblower, helped connect child predators to their victims. 

“The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls,” said the whistleblower, Arturo Bejar. 

But the more contentious design feature that came under scrutiny is end-to-end encryption, the technology that enables secure messaging on platforms like WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, and (until last week) Facebook Messenger. 

End-to-end encryption ensures that, so long as both devices used to communicate aren’t compromised, nobody — including the company providing the service — can snoop on a person’s messages. 

Meta, admittedly, is not the most sympathetic company. As the case has revealed, it was clearly cavalier in the design of its personalized algorithms, giving scant attention to how those technologies could assist bad actors. 

Maybe if the company hadn’t spent so much time and resources building now-shuttered features to censor and “fact check” disfavored political speech between 2017 and 2024, it could have prioritized actual safety concerns — instead of the complaints of politically motivated “counter-disinformation” activists. 

But the question at the heart of the trial goes beyond Meta, with the potential to impact many companies, like Signal, which are far more sympathetic. 

The question is this: Will end-to-end encryption, and the privacy it guarantees, be allowed to exist? How can it, when courts are using its very existence to hold companies liable for child endangerment? 

We seem to be sleepwalking toward a true panopticon society, in which nothing communicated digitally — even in “private” messages — is truly private. 

There must be a middle ground. Demanding companies end encryption and monitor all user messages is a little like asking the electric company to check which devices its customers are powering up — that it is, in fact, a microwave and not a glow lamp for marijuana farming. 

The answer will most likely be found in the age verification technologies that companies are rolling out. If minors are banned from using encrypted technology, it will at least be easier to make the case that adults should be allowed to use it. 

Still, age verification brings its own privacy challenges. If applied clumsily, as in the case of Discord, it risks leaking a user’s personal information all over the internet, effectively de-anonymizing users. 

There’s little point age-verifying to use end-to-end encryption if your private data is just going to leak anyway. 

A promising solution might be found in the field of zero-knowledge proof, in which trusted third-party verifiers separate information about a person’s age from other identifying information, like names and addresses. That enables users to prove their age while retaining online anonymity. 

Tellingly, however, the governments around the world (and in some US states) that are now demanding age verification are not packaging those demands with technical standards that mandate privacy-protecting methods. 

This is totally at odds with what governments — notably in the European Union — have been asking of tech companies for well over a decade: that they do more to protect user privacy. 

Governments and courts want to protect children and protect privacy at the same time. Both are important aims. But they need to think seriously about the technical means that enable both. 

Meta’s two court losses make solving that puzzle all the more urgent.

Allum Bokhari is managing director at the Foundation for Freedom Online, an online censorship watchdog. His previous work can be found at AllumBokhari.com.

California Post News: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, WhatsApp, LinkedIn
California Post SportsFacebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X
California Post Opinion
California Post Newsletters: Sign up here!
California Post App: Download here!
Home delivery: Sign up here!
Page Six Hollywood: Sign up here!