Meta, the owner of WhatsApp, is considering pulling the popular private messaging app from the UK over an ongoing row regarding the contentious proposed Online Safety Bill, ministers have been warned.
Children’s charities and the UK Home Office have in the last few years raised concerns that tech giants need to take responsibility for detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and terrorism content in social media networks.
But Baroness Claire Fox told the House of Lords last week that the online safety bill legislation was putting “enormous pressure” on tech giants and that they could just decide to quit the UK and focus on other markets.
“These services, such as WhatsApp, will potentially leave the UK. This is not like threatening to storm off,” she said.
“We must remember that they are global platforms. They have a system that works for billions of people all around the world. A relatively small market such as the UK is not something for which they would compromise their billions of users around the world.”
The tech industry says protecting users’ privacy is key and that firms shouldn’t be able to scan private messages sent by the public. They want a cybersecurity technology called end-to-end encryption to be built into their messaging apps, which prevents anyone outside of the parties receiving messages from viewing them.
Tech giants argue that end-to-end encryption is crucial to fighting online scams, fraud and data breaches.
Meanwhile, some governments and children’s charities claim that paedophiles are using private messaging apps to groom children and share illegal content, completely unnoticed by the service providers. They also say the likes of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter and Tiktok either need to scan photos and messages and inform the police, or build technology for this.
Tech giants say that asking them to break end-to-end encryption would be akin to allowing government mass surveillance of the general public, which would be in breach of our human rights.
A Home Office spokesman told The Standard: “We support strong encryption, but this cannot come at the cost of public safety. 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.
“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.”
EU plans to scan private messages
The UK is not the only country where new rules about social media are being considered.
In May 2022, the European Commission proposed a new Chat Control law. This would make it mandatory for all online services to use artificial intelligence (AI) to scan every single message or email sent for possible child grooming or CSAM content.
This is similar to the online safety bill, except that the UK legislation is written in a more ambiguous way, compared with the EU’s proposed legislation.
However, a new leaked document written by lawyers for the Council of the European Union, seen by UK magazine ComputerWeekly, warns that such a bill would be in breach of EU privacy rights.
“It appears that the generalised screening of content of communications to detect any kind of CSAM would require de facto prohibiting, weakening or otherwise circumventing cybersecurity measures,” the lawyers warned.
While tech firms have continued to champion end-to-end encryption as being crucial to protecting users’ privacy on the internet, 10 European countries are now backing new rules to enable the blanket monitoring of private messages. These include Ireland, Spain, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belgium, Latvia and Lithuania.
Given that Ireland is where many major tech giants have data centres in Europe, such a law being passed would enable EU governments to have access to billions of users’ content.
