Yesterday, the Complaints Office of eco – Association of the Internet Industry published its English version of its 2022 Annual Report. With 8,904 actionable cases, the eco Complaints Office once again recorded a new peak of notified legal violations on the Internet last year (2021: 8,613 actionable cases).
The number of actionable complaints about depictions of sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of minors actually increased by about 28 percent in 2022. Depictions of sexual violence against children continued to account for the majority of these complaints. Of the total of 8,760 cases from this area of offense, the majority – as in previous years – were regarding content that qualified as Child Pornography as defined in Section 184b of the German Criminal Code.
As sad and distressing as these increases are, especially concerning depictions of abuse of young people, they also show that our society is becoming more and more vigilant and is clearly acting against illegal content. The core message of our Complaints Office has resonated with people: Everyone can report illegal Internet content and thus actively contribute to its take-down as well as its prosecution.
And we are more than ever deeply convinced that the principle of take-down instead of blocking can be the only viable way to combat illegal Internet content. As such, current regulatory projects at the European level must more effectively promote this approach; the aims should be to incorporate established functioning structures and existing cooperations and synergies.
2022 has once again shown how important it is that illegal content can also be reported anonymously to the eco Complaints Office: Last year, the eco Complaints Office received a total of 18,110 complaints based on potentially criminal Internet content or Internet content relevant to youth media protection. Approximately 65 per cent of the complainants submitted these reports anonymously, representing an increase of 19 percentage points compared to the previous year.
What is also of interest to learn in this issue is that, in the shadow of an impending energy crisis, eco published a joint position paper last week. eco calls for data centres to be recognised as system-relevant IT infrastructures, regardless of their size, and to be prioritised accordingly in the event of supply shortages.
In addition, in this issue, the eco Association recommends Strong Passwords instead of Frequent Password Changes. We also report on the cancellation of the German Digital Budget and the publication of the latest eco position papers on the Regulation of the Cyber Resilience Act & on the eIDAS Regulation.
