WhatsApp said no, even if it means risking a UK ban. A British bill, the Online Security Bill, wants to make end-to-end encryption less opaque. The goal would be to make it possible to detect illegal content within encrypted exchanges. An insurmountable line for WhatsApp, says the British newspaper the independent.
The Meta Group app (which owns Facebook and Instagram) applies end-to-end encryption by default to all conversations. This means that only participants in an exchange can access it. Therefore, even WhatsApp cannot know what two users send each other within a messaging conversation.
Undermine privacy protection
The only impediment to this principle occurs when a message is flagged as inappropriate. WhatsApp moderation can then access the four previous messages to verify the content of the exchanges. This verification can be carried out by an artificial intelligence, but also by members of the moderation teams.
The person in charge of the application, Will Cathcart assured that he did not intend to degrade his current system. He said he was surprised that this proposal would harm WhatsApp’s privacy protection. According to him, such demands only come from “governments trying to suppress the ability of their citizens to communicate freely.”
The message manager says that it has not received any requests to remove end-to-end encryption from your application at this time.
alternative solutions
However, the bill, originally proposed by Boris Johnson, is currently pending in the UK Parliament. It could force apps to scan exchanges for terrorist content or child pornography. Something impossible to do without breaking end-to-end encryption.
However, WhatsApp notes that the end-to-end encryption weakening could not be done locally. Such implementation in the UK should apply equally in all parts of the world. Will Cathcart has announced that he is therefore not submitting to such a request.
As for considering a UK WhatsApp ban, the app’s administrator declined to speculate on that possibility. He just reminded that countries have already banned the courier service, especially in Iran. He except that in practice, users resort to solutions such as VPNs (virtual private networks) to circumvent these prohibitions.
Source: BFM TV
