WhatsApp head Will Cathcart has issued a warning over the potential effect of the Online Safety Bill on the chat app
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)As the controversial Online Safety Bill continues to make its way through Parliament, the head of WhatsApp has signalled that the company would rather block the app in the UK than break its end-to-end encryption as the unmodified law would require.
“The Bill provides for technology notices requiring communication providers to take away end-to-end encryption — to break it,” Will Cathcart told The Telegraph. “The hard reality is we offer a global product. It would be a very hard decision for us to make a change where 100 per cent of our users lower their security.”
Why is the Government gunning for encryption?
The contentious part of the bill requires companies to help to prevent the spread of child abuse and terrorist material by scanning messages — something impossible with end-to-end encryption in place, as it guarantees only the sender and recipient can read the contents. The bill gives the Office of Communications (Ofcom) the power to force companies to use “highly accurate technology to scan public and private channels for child sexual abuse material”.
Successive governments have long been fighting a so-far-unsuccessful battle against end-to-end encryption. Technology experts have largely been against attempts to weaken encryption, pointing out there’s no such thing as a back door that only law enforcement can open.
In short, you can’t create exceptions for government agencies without leaving the same loopholes to be exploited by cyber criminals. Or, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it in its most recent critique of the Government’s plans: “These types of systems create more vulnerabilities that endanger the rights of all users, including children.”
These expert interventions have generally fallen on deaf ears, with former home secretary Amber Rudd in 2017 memorably saying: “I don’t need to understand how encryption works to understand how it’s helping – end-to-end encryption – the criminals.”
Would WhatsApp walk?
It’s easy to assume that this is just sabre-rattling from WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta. It is in a strong position here, knowing that WhatsApp, with its 40 million UK users, is considerably more popular than the Government that could see it banned.
And while 40 million users is a lot, it’s a drop in the ocean of WhatsApp’s total pool of two billion customers worldwide, representing around two per cent of the total user base. Changing the way an app works is a lot of work for such a small fraction of users, especially when the change would anger privacy advocates in other countries.
It’s also worth noting that tech companies withdrawing services in Europe due to local laws isn’t without precedent.
In 2014, Spain introduced well-meaning, but poorly thought-through, legislation designed to support media outlets by taxing news engines sharing headlines and snippets.
Google’s reaction was simply to withdraw Google News from the country, which resulted in the legislation doing the very opposite of its noble intention. Rather than giving news sites more revenue, their web traffic suffered as potential readers could no longer find them. Eight years later, the Spanish government changed the law and Google News returned to Spain.
It’s a valuable lesson for a government already fighting dwindling poll ratings. Taking on big tech is risky business and could prompt a severe backlash from voters if the UK joins China, Syria and Qatar as the fourth country where WhatsApp simply doesn’t work.
