WhatsApp Could Disappear from UK Over Privacy Concerns

By Staff, Agencies

The UK government risks sleepwalking into a confrontation with WhatsApp that could lead to the messaging app disappearing from Britain, ministers have been warned, with options for an amicable resolution fast running out.

At the center of the row is the online safety bill, a vast piece of legislation that will touch on almost every aspect of online life in Britain. More than four years in the making, with eight secretaries of state and five prime ministers involved in its drafting, the bill, which is progressing through the House of Lords, is more than 250 pages long. The table of contents alone spans 10 pages.

The bill gives Ofcom the power to impose requirements for social networks to use technology to tackle terrorism or child abuse content, with fines of up to 10% of global turnover for those services that do not comply. Companies must use “best endeavors” to develop or source technology to obey the notice.

But for messaging apps that secure their user data with “end-to-end encryption” [E2EE], it is technologically impossible to read user messages without fundamentally breaking their promises to users. That, they say, is a step they will not take.

“The bill provides no explicit protection for encryption,” said a coalition of providers, including the market leaders 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% of users.”

Legislators have called on the government to take the concerns seriously. “These services, such as WhatsApp, will potentially leave the UK,” Claire Fox told the House of Lords last week. “This is not like threatening to storm off. It is not done in any kind of pique in that way. In putting enormous pressure on these platforms to scan communications, we must remember that they are global platforms.