LONDON: Ministers have been warned that WhatsApp could quit the UK if the government pushes ahead with the Online Safety Bill, the controversial piece of legislation that intends to improve internet safety.
“These services, such as WhatsApp, will potentially leave the UK,” Claire Fox, founder of the think tank Institute of Ideas, told the government last week.
She argues that the UK represents a “relatively small market” and that big tech will not compromise on user safety for billions of users around the world.
“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,” she added.
Meta’s instant messaging app is at the center of a nationwide debate over users’ safety and privacy concerns that could see the service deciding to leave the British market.
Last month, WhatsApp, Signal, and five other messaging services joined forces to criticize the government's Online Safety Bill.
In an open letter sent to the government, they expressed concern that the bill would kill end-to-end encryption, which could lead to “routine, general, and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages.”
The proposed legislation authorizes the British communications regulator, Ofcom, to require social networks to use technology to combat terrorism or child sexual abuse content. Failure to comply may result in fines of up to 10 percent of global revenue for the services in question.
The government said that companies such as Meta must use “best endeavours” to develop or source technology that adheres to the regulation.
However, messaging applications that employ end-to-end encryption claim that it is impossible to read user messages without violating their commitment to users, and they have already pledged to continue putting users’ privacy first.
These providers, including WhatsApp and Signal, also argued that the bill offers no explicit protection for encryption, and Ofcom could use it to mandate the scanning of private messages on E2EE communication services, undermining the purpose of E2EE and jeopardizing all users’ privacy.
“Ninety-eight percent of our users are outside the UK,” WhatsApp’s chief Will Cathcart told the press last 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 percent of users.”
Legislators and privacy groups have called on the government to take these concerns seriously, but supporters have shown so far little flexibility claiming that the online safety bill “in no way represents a ban on end-to-end encryption, nor will it require services to weaken encryption.”
But Richard Allan, former Meta’s head of policy, described the government approach as one of “intentional ambiguity” and said the government should make it clearer whether it wants or not to limit E2EE and stop playing “this high-stakes game.”
Supporters see the Online Safety Bill, which has been in the works for more than four years, as a beacon of online safety and a way to rein in big tech companies.
But several consumer protection groups dubbed the proposed law as “shortsighted” and a “threat to free speech,” adding that it fails to address the problem it was originally designed for.
“If we don’t want to lose our minds, we need to think about the systems, not the symptoms, of online harms,” said international human rights lawyer and pioneer in digital rights Susie Alegre.
“Rather than making the UK a beacon for online safety, the new bill fails to address the underlying issues, while exacerbating the risks to human rights by creating a system of outsourced censorship.”
