Introduction

Encryption is everywhere.

When you browse a secure website, communicate through a messaging app, access online banking, or entrust your data to an online health service, you are relying on encryption. For children, as for adults, encryption is a part of their lives, keeping their personal information and communications safe, online and offline.

The debate on encryption and children’s rights is often framed as a divide between a child protection approach and a civil liberties focus. But this polarisation masks a more complex truth.

Children, their rights and their interests are on all sides of this discourse. Applications of encryption can protect or expose children to violence, promote or undermine their privacy, encourage or chill their expression. Encryption engages nearly all of their human rights from a wide variety of angles.

The impact that encryption has, whether positive or negative, can also vary significantly for children depending on their backgrounds, needs and identities. If the approach to encryption is to take all children’s rights seriously, it must engage with how children are affected globally, including the specific experiences of children from disadvantaged and marginalised communities.

Towards a children’s rights approach to encryption

This report aims to recognise the full complexity of how encryption affects children and to set out an approach that is based on the full spectrum of their rights.

The development of encryption is intertwined with the technological developments of the late 20th century and the Internet specifically. If we are to understand where we are now, we must see how we got here. With this in mind, the report starts with the history of the debate around encryption, from the “crypto-wars” since the 1970s to the challenges we face today.

Responding to the need for an accessible analysis of the relevant technology, the report then examines what encryption is and how it works. This includes a discussion of technology used to identify child sexual abuse material online as well as online sexual exploitation and abuse. We aim to be clear about the benefits, costs and compromises of this technology, so that its legitimate role can be assessed.

If we are to move beyond the divides that are currently present in this field, we must understand the frictions and faultlines that exist in this space as well as where there is space for consensus. Interviews with the full range of organisations and experts with a stake in this issue were at the heart of the research. The report represents and examines the range of perspectives and approaches of those working on issues related to encryption, in order to help move beyond the polarisation that has been so present in the debate around encryption.

Building on this foundation, we explore how encryption engages with the full range of children’s rights, treating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child as an agreed international framework and examining how it applies to children affected by, or who use, technology that involves encryption. This analysis engages with the tensions that can exist between the desire to protect children from violence as well as to protect their privacy and the privacy of the public at large, but finds that we must move beyond a privacy versus protection framing if we are to ensure that all children’s rights are protected in this context.

Shaping the online space for children for the decades to come

Ultimately, with this report, we present our perspective on the issue and set out principles for a children’s rights approach to encryption. The aim is to provide a basis to shape how to design and evaluate policy-making on this issue grounded in the full range of children’s rights.

We are at a point in how the digital space is controlled, accessed, and regulated that will shape how children engage with it for decades to come. It is essential that such policy-making is based on an informed understanding and respect for its impact on the full range of their rights and meaningfully includes everyone whose rights are at stake.