Ms Olga Cronin:

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the US is something of a clearing house for big tech companies. At the moment they voluntarily scan messages for child sexual abuse material and flag it to the NCMEC, which then flags it to the relevant law enforcing authority wherever it is in the world. We get referrals from NCMEC. There is an issue with how this scanning takes place. It has a significant false positive rate. Unfortunately, what we have seen in Ireland - we got these figures from the Garda - is a significant percentage of the referrals that have been sent to the Garda were false positives and were images of children in the bath, innocent pictures of people's kids on the beach or consensual images between adults. It was disconcerting for us, and we raised this publicly last year or the year before, that An Garda Síochána was retaining personal data pertaining to those innocent files, if you like, even after gardaí found there was not a criminal case to answer.

There have been moves at a European level to make that kind of scanning mandatory, but they have stalled because the measure is so problematic in terms of being proportionate given that it does not do what it says it does perfectly. When it comes to encryption, there was a ruling in a European Court of Human Rights case just this morning that if you were to weaken encryption for one you, would weaken encryption for all. Again, there is a lot to unpack there.