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More than 1,700 websites in the EU may contain unreported child sexual abuse (CSAM) content, a new report found.
These worrying findings come from a recent study conducted by experts at Surfshark. Researchers looked at the issue on a global scale, too, recording an increase in CSAM reports filed to authorities. There were about 83 million between 2020 and 2022, with EU countries accounting for 3.1 million reports.
This investigation comes a few days after a group of tech companies—Surfhsark included—wrote an open letter urging EU ministers to withdraw from a proposed anti-CSAM regulation that could enable authorities to scan all citizens' private communication for dangerous content. By looking at currently available tech solutions, the VPN service provider seeks to raise critical questions about how this growing problem can be addressed without infringing on people's privacy.
Children's online security at risk
"There may be thousands of unreported websites containing CSAM at any given moment. Our study estimates as many as 1,720 websites in the EU alone. It’s scary to think about how many websites containing CSAM are live at this moment in the rest of the world and have not yet been reported," Lina Survila, Surfshark spokesperson, told me when commenting on the findings.
As we mentioned, researchers at Surfshark examined the extent of the child exploitation issue online across the EU and around the world.
In Europe, Poland seems to have the biggest CSAM problem as the country may account for 16% of EU cases (269 unreported local harmful websites). France follows suit with 260 potentially dangerous websites, Germany with 158, Hungary with 152, and Italy with 110.