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Following a five-month delay, the Online Safety Bill, which would force WhatsApp to break its end-to-end encryption, was reintroduced in the UK parliament last week.
Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp at Meta, believes it is preferable to have the instant messenger WhatsApp banned in the UK than to make communications between users accessible to authorities.
Following a five-month delay, the Online Safety Bill, which would force WhatsApp to break its end-to-end encryption, was reintroduced in the UK parliament last week.
End-to-end encryption makes it difficult for other parties or WhatsApp itself to access private communications.
On Saturday, Cathcart told The Telegraph, “the measure provides for technological notifications forcing communication companies to remove end-to-end encryption – to break it.”
“The hard reality is we offer a global product. It would be a very hard decision for us to make a change where 100% of our users lower their security,” Cathcart said, adding that the company would rather face the risk of being forced out than scale back its privacy protections.
We believe that the ideal trade-off is to provide a secure service to all those who have access to it while accepting that we are prohibited in some places.
Former Prime Minister Theresa May proposed the Online Safety Bill in 2019 and it has since undergone multiple amendments. The administration claims that the measure is required to apprehend terrorists and child abusers.
A government spokeswoman told the British media that “end-to-end encryption cannot be permitted to impede efforts to catch perpetrators of the most heinous crimes.”
According to the government’s website, the measure would empower telecoms regulator Ofcom to “employ extremely accurate technology to check public and private channels for child sexual abuse material” as a “last resort.”
WhatsApp is prohibited or limited in China, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
