WhatsApp might stop being available in the UK as legislators’ and tech companies’ diverging views clash over new safety bill. The Online Safety Bill, originally proposed by Boris Johnson, is currently being examined by the British Parliament, and it could force applications to disclose exchanges for potential terrorist or child pornography content. Companies risk fines of up to 10% of global turnover if they do not comply, according to The Guardian. The bill is more than 250 pages long, with a 10-page table of contents.
So far WhatsApp has remained reluctant to consider any changes to the way messages are exchanged on its platform, even if that could mean risking a ban in the UK. The bill would like to make end-to-end encryption less opaque with the aim of detecting illegal content within encrypted exchanges.
WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption by default in all conversations. This means that only the participants in an exchange can access it. WhatsApp is unable to see the content of any two-way or group exchange. The only exception occurs when a message is flagged as inappropriate. WhatsApp moderation can then access the previous four messages to check the content of the exchanges. This verification can be done by an artificial intelligence, but also by members of the moderation teams.
“The bill provides no explicit protection for encryption,” said a coalition of providers, including the market leaders WhatsApp and Signal, in an open letter last month, as reported by The Guardian. “If implemented as written, could empower Ofcom to try to force the proactive scanning of private messages on end-to-end encrypted communication services, nullifying the purpose of end-to-end encryption as a result and compromising the privacy of all users.”
The head of WhatsApp at parent company Meta, Will Cathcart, told The Independent that he does not intend to degrade its current system. He said he was shocked that this proposal could harm the privacy protection implemented by WhatsApp. According to him, such requests have only come from “governments that were trying to suppress the ability of their citizens to communicate freely”.
“When a liberal democracy asks whether it is acceptable to scan everyone’s private communications for illegal content, it prompts countries around the world, which have very different definitions of illegal content, to propose the same thing,” Cathcart told The Independent.
WhatsApp emphasizes that weakening end-to-end encryption could not be done locally. Such an implementation in the UK would have to be applied in the same way worldwide. Will Cathcart the company was currently not considering the implementation of such a request.
“We support strong encryption, but this cannot come at the cost of public safety,” a Home Office spokesperson said, according to The Guardian. “Tech companies have a moral duty to ensure they are not blinding themselves and law enforcement to the unprecedented levels of child sexual abuse on their platforms. The online safety bill in no way represents a ban on end-to-end encryption, nor will it require services to weaken encryption.”
As for considering a ban on WhatsApp in the UK, Cathcart refused to speculate on this possibility. He noted that some countries have already banned the messaging service, including Iran, where users circumvent the constraint with the use of VPNs.
