The bill reportedly gives the government the power to impose requirements for social networks to use technology to tackle terrorism or child sexual abuse content, with fines of up to 10% of global turnover for those services that do not comply. For messaging apps that secure their user data with “end-to-end encryption” (E2EE), it means breaking E2EE. As without that it is technologically impossible to read user messages. End-to-end encryption or E2EE means that no one other than the sender and the recipient of the message can read it, this includes WhatsApp.
“The bill provides no explicit protection for encryption,” said a coalition of providers, including WhatsApp and Signal, in an open letter last month. Signal too is opposing the UK’s online safety bill.
What WhatsApp says
“Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK,” WhatsApp’s chief, Will Cathcart, had told the website earlier this year. “They do not want us to lower the security of the product, and just as a straightforward matter, it would be an odd choice for us to choose to lower the security of the product in a way that would affect those 98% of users.” Cathcart also said that WhatsApp would rather be blocked in the UK than weaken the privacy of encrypted messaging.
The government’s stance is that it is possible to have both privacy and child safety. “We support strong encryption,” a government official told BBC “but this cannot come at the cost of public safety.”
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