Cyberbullying, sexting and all other aspects of online life that cause teenagers misery may seem pretty complex and intractable problems. But not for Jeremy Hunt. Somehow, when not dealing with despairing junior doctors, he’s found the time to devise a simple solution to end them all.
In case you’ve missed it, the health secretary’s big idea to tackle the - very real - problems of sexting and cyberbullying is to call on social media and tech companies to ban them.
Hunt wants the WhatsApps and Snapchats of this world to engineer in the inability for minors to send naked selfies or to type words on social media sites that could be used to bully.
When you send a naked selfie on say WhatsApp it doesn’t go into the ether where it can be analysed by software to search for uncovered flesh. From device to device the messages are encrypted, meaning no one can see the content until it arrives with the intended recipient.
Some platforms like Snapchat are less secure, but analysing pictures in real time isn’t technically feasible yet. Even if it was, children could just switch to more secure services and tackling those would rely on breaking end-to-end encryption.
When reading this article, I do agree with some of the points. The main one being that we can't blame technology companies for sexting and such. However, I do believe they do play some part in it and aren't doing enough to prevent it from happening.
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