Post by acnedriver on May 8, 2023 11:42:36 GMT
I know many of you use WhatsApp. It is a useful tool.....So... The government's online safety bill will give Ofcom the power to impose requirements for social networks to use technology to tackle terrorism or child sexual abuse content.
But WhatsApp secures user data with “end-to-end encryption” (E2EE), making it technologically impossible to read user messages without breaking their promises to users, so the app is not happy.
“The bill provides no explicit protection for encryption,” said a coalition of providers, including WhatsApp and Signal, in an open letter last month, “and 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.”
If push came to shove, they say, they would choose to protect the security of their non-UK users. “Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK,” WhatsApp’s chief, Will Cathcart, told the Guardian in March. “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 per cent of users.”
Meanwhile politicians are split on the issue with Claire Fox speaking out against this measure of the bill in the house of lords but others saying it was necessary.
There were record levels of online child sexual abuse, Richard Collard, of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), said, with the victims, mostly girls, targeted at an increasingly young age.
"The front line of this fight to keep our children safe is private messaging - and it would be inconceivable for regulators and law enforcement to suddenly go into retreat at the behest of some of the world's biggest companies," he said.
But WhatsApp secures user data with “end-to-end encryption” (E2EE), making it technologically impossible to read user messages without breaking their promises to users, so the app is not happy.
“The bill provides no explicit protection for encryption,” said a coalition of providers, including WhatsApp and Signal, in an open letter last month, “and 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.”
If push came to shove, they say, they would choose to protect the security of their non-UK users. “Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK,” WhatsApp’s chief, Will Cathcart, told the Guardian in March. “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 per cent of users.”
Meanwhile politicians are split on the issue with Claire Fox speaking out against this measure of the bill in the house of lords but others saying it was necessary.
There were record levels of online child sexual abuse, Richard Collard, of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), said, with the victims, mostly girls, targeted at an increasingly young age.
"The front line of this fight to keep our children safe is private messaging - and it would be inconceivable for regulators and law enforcement to suddenly go into retreat at the behest of some of the world's biggest companies," he said.