Some of the world's biggest technology companies, like Microsoft and Apple, aren't doing enough to prevent the spread of child sexual exploitation on their platforms, according Australia's e-Safety Commissioner.
A report from Julie Inman Grant, a world first of its kind, found tech companies were failing to proactively detect exploitation in cloud storage and streaming services.
"Some of the largest, richest, most powerful tech companies in the world are turning a blind eye to crime scenes happening on their platforms, being hosted on their cloud-based services, being propagated through their messaging services and they're simply not doing enough," Ms Inman Grant told the ABC.
After years of talking with the companies, the commissioner used new laws that allowed her to send questions to Apple, Facebook's owner Meta, WhatsApp, Microsoft, Skype, Snap and Omegle, demanding they answer what they were doing to tackle the issue.
Ms Inman Grant, a former Twitter employee and two-decade veteran of the sector, said she was both shocked and disheartened yet not surprised companies weren't taking more meaningful action.
She said none of the companies that offered streaming, where exploitation of impoverished children was rife, were using available tools to search for abusive material.
"The kind of child sexual exploitation that we're talking about is known child sexual exploitation and the tools like photo DNA have been around since 2009," Ms Inman Grant said.
"We're simply asking the companies that invented it to start using them across their platforms and services."
Microsoft developed that photo detection technology, which Ms Inman Grant said was used on the company's X-Box gaming service. But she said she was disappointed it was not used on more Microsoft platforms.
Failure to respond to the e-Safety Commissioner's questions could have resulted in the companies facing fines of up to $550,000 a day.
Ms Inman Grant said she expected governments across the globe would look to her report, further adding pressure on the tech companies to do more.
She said the full extent of child sexual abuse would not be known until companies unearthed the material on their platforms.
Her office has handled more than 61,000 complaints about illegal and restricted content since 2015, with the majority involving child sexual exploitation material.
The e-Safety Commissioner has the power to ask the tech companies to continue to provide transparency reports.
She said she was closely looking at codes of conduct to determine if making them mandatory was sufficient or if new standards were needed to force the tech companies to do more.
