Richard Allan, the Liberal Democrat peer who worked as Meta’s head of policy for a decade until 2019, described the government approach as one of “intentional ambiguity”. “Where it is the only effective, proportionate and necessary action available, Ofcom will be able to direct platforms to use accredited technology, or make best endeavours to develop new technology, to accurately identify child sexual abuse content, so it can be taken down and the despicable predators brought to justice.” “The online safety bill in no way represents a ban on end-to-end encryption, nor will it require services to weaken encryption. 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. A relatively small market such as the UK is not something for which they would compromise their billions of users around the world.”Ī Home Office spokesperson said: “We support strong encryption, but this cannot come at the cost of public safety. “They have a system that works for billions of people all around the world.

In putting enormous pressure on these platforms to scan communications, we must remember that they are global platforms. It is not done in any kind of pique in that way. “This is not like threatening to storm off. “These services, such as WhatsApp, will potentially leave the UK,” Claire Fox told the House of Lords last week. Legislators have called on the government to take the concerns seriously. “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,” WhatsApp’s chief, Will Cathcart, told the Guardian in March. If push came to shove, they say, they would choose to protect the security of their non-UK users.

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