Jeremy Malcolm

Child Protection or Privacy Invasion? Examining the Online Safety Bill

There’s perhaps no more important issue than the protection of children from sexual abuse, and certainly none that is more emotive or politically potent. In any other circumstances, proposing to extend mass surveillance to communications that were previously confidential would be politically near impossible. But by invoking the justification of saving children, achieving the impossible […]

Generative AI and Children: Prioritizing Harm Prevention

Among many hot policy issues around generative AI, one that has gained increasing attention in recent months is the potential (and, increasingly, actual) use of this technology to create, as the New York Times puts it, “explicit imagery of children who do not exist.” The concerns expressed are mostly pragmatic, not moral; for example the […]

Four Proposed Child Safety Laws, Four Approaches

The U.S. EARN IT Act, Britain’s Online Safety Bill and its stateside counterpart the Kids Online Safety Act, an upcoming European regulation combating child sexual abuse online, and a proposed United Nations convention on cybercrime, are a few current proposals for new legal instruments addressing child safety online at national, regional, and global levels. While […]

How Your Platform Can Find And Report CSAM

Sooner or later, every Internet platform that allows user-generated content will have to deal with child sexual abuse material or CSAM being uploaded. Being faced with this problem doesn’t necessarily mean that your platform has a seedy or abusive community. Research conducted by Facebook in 2021 revealed that most of the CSAM found on its […]

Jeremy Malcolm

Trust & Safety Consultant