The eSafety Commissioner has reported that major tech giants, including Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, are continuing to fail in addressing critical safety gaps regarding child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) despite some incremental improvements in their services. According to the second in a series of transparency reports mandated under Australia’s Online Safety Act, several prominent platforms still lack proactive detection tools for live-streamed abuse and newly created CSEA material, often relying instead on reactive user reporting. Specifically, the report highlights that Apple does not use tools to detect new CSEA across any of its services, while companies like Meta and Google have failed to implement detection for live CSEA on Messenger and Google Meet respectively. Furthermore, many services have neglected to deploy language analysis tools to combat sexual extortion, despite being provided with necessary indicators by eSafety. While the report notes positive developments such as faster moderator response times from Snap, the expansion of known CSEA detection by Microsoft, and the implementation of nudity-blurring features by Apple and Google, Commissioner Julie Inman Grant emphasized that the remaining gaps represent a failure of corporate will rather than technical capability.
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