Privacy Battle Rages Over Government Plans which ‘Could End’ Encrypted Messaging Apps like WhatsApp and Telegram

Campaigners have expressed grave concerns over parts of the Online Safety Bill they say could effectively end encrypted messaging apps that protect users’ privacy. 

A global coalition of democracy and tech experts – including figures from Liberty, Big Brother Watch and Open Rights Group – have published an open letter to the Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary and all peers, urgently calling for amendments to the Government’s flagship Online Safety Bill. 

The legislation – which has been in the running for several years but is now reaching its final stages in Parliament – seeks to regulate “online harms” to protect children and stop crime. 

But a collective of privacy experts around the world believe that the legislation, as it stands, will seriously undermine end-to-end encryption – the principle that no one can intercept messages between two people on apps like WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. 

The move to allow security services and social media firms to scan messages for “dangerous” content “jeopardises” the right to privacy, they argue – by opening backdoors for governments around the world to try and get access to dissidents and journalists’ messages. 

The threat to end-to-end encryption could “potentially facilitate unprecedented corporate and government surveillance,” the group, coordinated by FairVote UK, says. 

The letter hits out at the Government for establishing what the group terms a “false dichotomy” between privacy and safety – effectively treating all citizens as potential online threats. 

The coalition warns that this approach not only poses a risk for UK citizens but also sets a dangerous international precedent, which could potentially be exploited by authoritarian governments.

“We urge you to carefully consider amendments to the bill that protect encryption and ensure that privacy remains a fundamental right to be enjoyed by all citizens,” the letter states.

Echoing concerns raised last week by another joint statement supported by 87 organisations and experts, the coalition is encouraging an “open and nuanced” discussion regarding the bill, aimed at identifying effective ways of promoting online safety without undermining personal privacy rights.

Campaigners hope that their “united voice” will be heard in the House of Lords as the legislation reaches its report stage, potentially as soon as today.

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Kyle Taylor, founder of Fair Vote UK, said: “The right to privacy is a fundamental bedrock of a democratic society. Verbal government assurances that everything is fine with regard to preserving privacy do not satisfy the views of organisations and experts who have been working on these issues for years. More must be done. 

“Privacy is freedom, and freedom is democracy. If you threaten the first, the rest can fall like dominoes.”

In a letter last July, then Home Secretary Priti Patel wrote that “things like end-to-end encryption significantly reduce the ability for platforms to detect child sexual abuse” and that bill “sets a clear legal duty to prevent, identify and remove child sexual abuse content, irrespective of the technologies they use”.

“Nobody can sensibly deny that this is a moral imperative… If end-to-end encryption is implemented without the relevant safety mitigations in place, this will become much harder,” she said. “It will significantly reduce tech companies’ and law enforcement’s ability to detect child sexual abuse happening online. This is obviously unacceptable.”

The Letter