The tech sector has called into question the UK Government’s Online Safety Bill, which this week was going through the House of Lords. This committee stage of line by line scrutiny is due to run until next month.
Briefly, the Bill seeks to establish a new regulatory regime to address illegal and harmful content online (which itself has seen much debate, about what should be included, from scams to pornographic content) and impose legal requirements on search engine and internet service providers. The bill will also add to powers of the Office of Communications watchdog (Ofcom), for it to act as the online safety regulator.
Ofcom meanwhile has appointed Almudena Lara, from Google, as its Online Safety Policy Director, who will co-lead the watchdog’s new Online Safety Policy Development unit.
The wildly popular free messaging app WhatsApp (as used by politicians, such as Matt Hancock while Health Secretary, as aired by the Daily Telegraph recently in its expose of the months of covid lockdown and UK public health policy) has described in a blog entry the Bill as a ‘troubling development’. As drafted, WhatsApp (part of Meta) blogged, ‘the Bill could break end-to-end encryption,opening the door to routine, general and indiscriminate surveillance of personal messages of friends, family members, employees, executives, journalists, human rights activists and even politicians’. The Bill could empower Ofcom to ‘try to force the proactive scanning of private messages on end-to-end encrypted communication services – nullifying the purpose of end-to-end encryption as a result and compromising the privacy of all users’. The Bill could introduce ‘mass surveillance of people’s private communications’, the blog summed up.
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Rashik Parmar, Chief Executive of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT said: “It’s the wrong time to weaken encryption when it is vital to public trust in the value of technology. Every genuine tech professional wants children to be safe online; but we need to guard the basic security that underpins everyone’s privacy.
‘There is grave concern that the Online Safety Bill’s requirements around identifying illegal content could break the principle of end-to-end encryption with the promise of a magical backdoor. Once a backdoor has been compromised, data and content protected by the encryption becomes accessible. This is exactly what many bad actors would welcome.
‘Building confidence in technology is a global priority in 2023. A bill aimed at keeping us safe online should protect encrypted messaging.’
The children’s charity the NSPCC has complained of unregulated social media, defined by companies ‘overlooking the needs and experiences of children on their sites, resulting in record levels of abuse and harm’.
Brian Higgins, Security Specialist at Comparitech, said: “Providers of encrypted messaging platforms have long been hiding behind ‘user privacy’ to avoid any attempts to prevent the harms they cause to children, young and vulnerable people by allowing blanket access for predatory and malicious actors. Whilst these groups and individuals represent a very small percentage of users, the resources involved in identifying and removing them, much less supporting prosecutions, fly in the face of the operator’s commercial business goals. Common sense should dictate that there is a compromise to be reached here but any concessions would certainly impact on revenues and profits. Unfortunately cash comes before children for these companies and they appear to prefer threats over conversations. I’m not quite sure how enforceable the OSB restrictions would be if implemented in their current form, but surely there is a middle ground that lawmakers and operators can reach. The only victims will continue to be consumers if they don’t.”
