There can be more procedural safeguards so that this can’t just happen independently as a decision.”Īlthough WhatsApp is best known as a messaging app, the company also offers social networking-style features through its “communities” offering, which allows group chats of more than a 1,000 users to be grouped together to mimic services such as Slack and Discord. It could explicitly say that end-to-end encryption should not be taken away. “It could make clear that privacy and security should be considered in the framework. Similar legislation in other jurisdictions, such as the EU’s digital markets act, explicitly defends end-to-end encryption for messaging services, Cathcart said, and he called for similar language to be inserted into the UK bill before it passed. If the company refused to do, it could face fines of up to 4% of its parent company Meta’s annual turnover – unless it pulled out of the UK market entirely. Under the bill, the government or Ofcom could require WhatsApp to apply content moderation policies that would be impossible to comply with without removing end-to-end encryption. The online safety bill is a concerning expansion of that power, because of the “grey area” in the legislation.
The UK government already has the power to demand the removal of encryption thanks to the 2016 investigatory powers act, but WhatsApp has never received a legal demand to do so, Cathcart said. WhatsApp cannot read messages sent over its own service, and so cannot comply with law enforcement requests to hand over messages, or pleas to actively monitor communications for child protection or antiterror purposes. “End-to-end” encryption is used in messaging services to prevent anyone but the recipients of a communication from being able to decrypt it. 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.” “Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK. “The reality is, our users all around the world want security,” said Cathcart. But we’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that. We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example.
Some countries have chosen to block it: that’s the reality of shipping a secure product. There isn’t a way to change it in just one part of the world. He said: “It’s a remarkable thing to think about.
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