Sweetshop’s Nicolas Jack Davies should send shivers down your spine. It aims to make end-to-end encryption important to you. Right now, you think it’s a good thing, think it’s innocuous, or you don’t know and don’t care about it.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) appears to be a good thing. It prevents third parties from accessing data while it’s transferred from one end system or device to another. Only the intended recipient can read it. But the technology, used by many popular messaging services such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Zoom, makes it harder for providers to share user information from their services with authorities and potentially provides private messaging to people involved in illicit activities.

If social media companies have or do put it in place without the right safeguards, it can put children and teens in danger. It blinds the companies to child sex abuse happening on their platforms, preventing illegal activity from being detected and investigated by law enforcement. Ultimately, the charities say, it can lead to millions of reports of child sexual abuse being lost every year.

Davies directed the film for a coalition of charities, who hope to motivate parents and care givers to ask social media companies to work with charities to protect every child online and our privacy, by visiting the website www.noplacetohide.org.uk and supporting a letter written to Mark Zuckerberg, from child sex abuse survivor, Rhiannon-Faye McDonald.

The film is set in an everyday domestic world to which anybody can relate, a striking counterpoint to its dark and suspenseful mood. Whether it’s the teenage girls in the cafe, the dad taking his kid to the play park, or the selfie-taking daughter wrangling with her mum at bedtime – anyone can be affected by child sex abuse online.

Davies commented, “This is brilliantly powerful creative about such an alarming, yet important subject as E2EE on social networks. As a dad, I feel the importance of this message deeply, this threat haunts modern parents. And making work that has societal impact matters to me hugely as a filmmaker.”

Credits

Production Company: Sweetshop 
Director: Nicolas Jack Davies
Executive Producers: Morgan Whitlock & Justin Edmund-White 
Producer: Theo Youngstein
Production Manager: Claire Adcock 
Production Co-ordinator: David Maart 
Production Assistant: Hannah Lockwood 
DOP: Harry Wheeler
Production Designer: Ashling Johnson 
Costume Designer: Lydia Kovacs 
Hair & Make-up: Lu Hinton
Casting: Hammond Cox

Offline Edit: TenThree
Editor: Billy Mead
Producer: Rachel Goodger 
Post Production: Absolute Post