The European Parliament and the EU Council reached agreement on Thursday 29 April on the proposal for provisional legislation on the detection, reporting and removal by help services of child sexual abuse committed online on messaging or email services (see EUROPE 12674/14).
The provisional regulation will apply for 3 years or until an earlier date, if the permanent legal instrument is adopted by the legislators and repeals these temporary rules before that date, a diplomatic source told EUROPE. Full legislation is expected to be presented later this year by the European Commission.
Welcoming the agreement between the Parliament and the EU Council, the European Commission also noted that this proposal was necessary and urgent, providing legal certainty for communication services, which have fallen under the ePrivacy Directive from 21 December 2020.
“Today’s agreement helps make the internet safer for children, which is one of our priorities. The temporary derogation in the regulation approved today provides legal clarity for voluntary actions to detect, report and eliminate child sexual abuse”, said Executive Vice-President for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age, Margrethe Vestager.
In detail, the new regulation proposes, in addition to a definition of child sexual abuse in line with European standards, human supervision for all processing of personal data and human confirmation before reporting to the competent authorities. Appeal mechanisms will be put in place to ensure that erroneously deleted content can be restored as soon as possible.
In addition, service providers will have to ensure that the technologies used to detect child pornography and report child sexual abuse are as non-intrusive as possible to privacy.
The European Data Protection Board will be asked to issue guidelines to assist competent authorities in assessing compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation. For its part, the Commission will have to establish a public register of organisations acting in the public interest against child sexual abuse. It is these latter that will be able to rely on the providers of online communication services to share the personal data resulting from the voluntary measures.
This provisional legislation, proposed by the Commission in September 2020 (see EUROPE 12557/13), must now be formally adopted by the European Parliament and the EU Council. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)