WhatsApp would refuse to comply with the requirements of the online security bill that sought to ban end-to-end encryption, the head of the chat app has said, casting doubt on the future of the service in the UK.
Speaking during a visit to the UK where he will meet lawmakers to discuss the government’s flagship internet regulation, Will Cathcart, WhatsApp head of Meta, described the bill as the most worrying legislation currently being discussed in the UK. Western world.
He said: “It’s a remarkable thing to think about. There is no way to change it in one part of the world. Some countries have chosen to block it: that is the reality of shipping a safe product. We have recently been blocked in Iran, for example. But we have never seen a liberal democracy do that.
“The reality is that our users around the world want security,” Cathcart said. “Ninety-eight percent of our users are outside of the UK. They don’t want us to lower the security of the product and it would just be a strange choice for us to choose to lower the security of the product in a way that would affect 98% of users.”
“End-to-end” encryption is used in messaging services to prevent anyone other than the recipient of a communication from being able to decrypt it. WhatsApp cannot read messages sent through its own service and therefore cannot comply with law enforcement requests to deliver messages or to actively monitor communications for child protection or anti-terrorism purposes.
The UK government already has the power to demand the removal of encryption thanks to the 2016 investigative powers act, but WhatsApp has never received a legal demand to do sosaid Cathcart. The online security bill is a worrying expansion of that power, due to the “grey area” in the legislation.
Under the bill, the government or Ofcom could require WhatsApp to apply content moderation policies that would be impossible to enforce without removing end-to-end encryption. If the company refused to do so, it could face fines of up to 4% of its parent company Meta’s annual turnover unless it withdrew from the UK market entirely.
Similar legislation in other jurisdictions, such as the EU’s digital markets law, explicitly advocates end-to-end encryption for messaging services, Cathcart said, calling for similar language to be inserted into the UK bill before that it be approved. “It could make it clear that privacy and security need to be considered in the framework. You could explicitly say that end-to-end encryption should not be removed. There may be more procedural safeguards so that this can’t happen independently as a decision.”
Although WhatsApp is best known as a messaging app, the company also offers social network-style features through its “communities” offering, which allows group chats of more than 1,000 users to be pooled together to mimic services like Slack and Discord. Those are also end-to-end encrypted, but Cathcart argued that the chances of a large community causing problems were slim. “When you enter a group of that size, the ease for a person to report it is very high, to the point that if there really is something serious, it is very easy for a person to report it, or easy if someone is investigating so they have access. ”.
after newsletter promotion
The company also officially requires UK users to be over 16, but Cathcart declined to advise parents whose children have an account on the service to remove it, saying “it’s important that parents make well-considered decisions.” “.
The online security bill is expected to return to parliament this summer. If approved, it will give Ofcom significant new powers as internet regulator and allow it to require effective moderation of content on pain of large fines.
