The bill provides the government with the capability to impose requirements for social networks to utilize technology that helps fight terrorism or child pornography content, with those services that are non-compliant potentially being fined up to 10% of global turnover. For messaging apps that use “end-to-end encryption” (E2EE) to keep user data secure, it means breaking E2EE because it is technologically impossible to read user messages without it. End-to-end encryption means that only the sender and the recipient of a message can read it, and this includes WhatsApp.
Last month a coalition of providers, including WhatsApp and Signal, published an open letter stating that “the bill provides no explicit protection for encryption.” Signal is also opposed to the UK’s online safety bill.
WhatsApp’s stance
“Ninety-eight per cent of our users are located outside the UK,” revealed WhatsApp’s chief, Will Cathcart, earlier this year. “They do not want us to lower the security of the product, and it would be an odd choice for us to do so in a way that affects those 98%.” Cathcart also stated that WhatsApp would prefer to be blocked in the UK than to compromise the privacy of encrypted messaging.
The government maintains that privacy and child safety can coexist. “We support strong encryption,” a government official explained to the BBC, “but this cannot come at the cost of public safety.”
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