CANBERRA, July 24 (Xinhua) -- The Australian government will issue significant fines to technology giants that fail to report on how they are combating the spread of child abuse material on their platforms.
The government on Wednesday issued legal notices to technology companies including Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, requiring them to report to the eSafety Commissioner every six months for the next two years on the measures they have in place to tackle online child sexual abuse.
The companies will have until February 15, 2025, to provide the first reports on how they are combating child abuse material, livestreamed abuse, online grooming, sexual extortion and, where applicable, the production of child abuse material using generative artificial intelligence (AI).
Those that fail to deliver reports will face financial penalties of up to 782,500 Australian dollars (516,581.7 U.S. dollars) for each day they do not comply.
The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, said the decision to compel the companies to make the reports was based on answers provided to her office in 2022 and 2023 that exposed significant safety concerns regarding protecting children from abuse.
"We're stepping up the pressure on these companies to lift their game," she said in a statement.
Apple and Microsoft in 2022 told the watchdog that they did not proactively detect child abuse content stored on the cloud while messaging services Skype, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime and Discord did not use any technology to detect child sexual abuse in live video chats.
Meta reported to eSafety that it did not always share information between its services when an account was banned for child abuse and eight different Google services were not blocking links to websites known to contain child abuse material.
"In our subsequent conversations with these companies, we still haven't seen meaningful changes or improvements to these identified safety shortcomings," Inman Grant said on Wednesday.
She said response times to reports of child abuse varied between technology companies in 2022 from as little as four minutes to up to 19 days.
Commenti