The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging services, which will destroy end-to-end encryption. No amendments have been accepted that would mitigate the bill’s most dangerous elements. If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself.
If they force messengers to implement backdoors into the protocol, I doubt they will limit it to UK users. Also, conversations with UK users won’t be private anymore even if the other party is from another country.
Client-side scanning might not be enforced for other accounts but when the infrastructure is there other governments will want to use it, too.
That definitely won’t happen. Full E2EE apps like Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp aren’t going to risk the worldwide backlash that would come with implementing backdoor access. The UK market isn’t that big and definitely not worth it, they’d pull out of the UK entirely first.
I hope they will. My guess is that a nonprofit like Signal will pull out. They have nothing to gain and a reputation to lose. The others will probably comply by implementing some form of client-side scanning.
I wonder if it will be analogous to the situation in China. Is an iMessage conversation safe if one party is based in China and their data is stored in data centers there?