The dispute between the British government and WhatsApp around a bill to protect citizens from terrorism and child sexual abuse makes the possibility that Mark Zuckerberg’s company stop operating on the islands increasingly closer. The center of the conflict is the Online Security Proposal, a 250-page text that took four years to prepare and the work of the last five prime ministers, which is advancing steadily in Parliament.
The law would give communications regulator Ofcom the power to compel platforms to use its technology to tackle those crimes, with fines of up to 10% of your global billing if they didn’t. The companies argue that it would be impossible to comply without breaking the privacy contract based on end-to-end encryption, that is, the system by which only the users who communicate can read a message.
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If the law is enacted, platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal (also widely used, although with more emphasis on security) have already announced that will protect non-UK users, that is, 98% of its market. Convinced of the project, a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior insisted before The Guardian that “tech companies have a moral duty to ensure that they are not blinding themselves or law enforcement to unprecedented levels of child abuse on their platforms”.
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The government proposes that to combat these crimes it is not necessary to prohibit encryption, but rather companies direct their “best efforts” to develop technologies that accurately identify illegal content, “so that these despicable predators may be prosecuted.” That goal will only be met if the platforms deliver data such as the suspect’s contacts, their location, and the groups to which they belong. Far from being resolved, the conflict could set a precedent that the rest of the countries would observe carefully.
AO JL
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