WePROTECT Summit, London 2014

WP summit 2014

The UK Prime Minister hosted the #WePROTECT Global Summit in December, 2014. The summit gathered countries, leading technology companies and civil society organizations in London to galvanize action to tackle online child sexual exploitation. Alongside a raft of measures and technical innovations to tackle those who use the Internet to view and share indecent images, the Prime Minister announced that the UK will work with UNICEF to develop a new global Child Protection Fund and that the UK would be making a £50 million contribution to the fund, over five years.

Keith Bristow, Director General of the National Crime Agency, spoke about the need for law enforcement, the civil society and industry to work together to minimise risk to children and maximise risk to offenders. Joanna Shields, the Prime Minister’s Digital Adviser, spoke about the importance of the technology industry using its talents, skills and capacity for innovation to tackle online child exploitation and she delivered a report on milestones by industry partners over the course of 2014.

Attendees also heard from executives from Microsoft, Google, EY and Visa, who set out their work as part of #WePROTECT and pledged to continue with the development of the concepts that had emerged from May’s workshop, including blocking the viewing of illegal material at the browser level, internet interaction risk scoring, a victim identification tool and a system for children to report self generated indecent images.