Signal sends a message to governments everywhere: privacy is a basic human right

The president of the Signal Foundation, Meredith Whittaker, has made it abundantly clear in a statement that if the UK passes the Online Safety Bill, which was launched by Boris Johnson and is about to be voted on in Parliament, it will quit the UK market.

What is the Online Safety Bill and why has it angered an electronic messaging app like Signal? The answer is simple: the law requires companies that offer online services to be able to monitor user-created content for child pornography and terrorism, something that Signal, which is all about user privacy and end-to-end encryption, simply can’t do.

The company says that if it is legally obliged to weaken its encryption so as to able to monitor what its users are saying, it would refuse to cooperate, which would mean its withdrawal from the market to avoid possible sanctions. That’s what you call a consistent stance. Some may say that, in reality, we are talking about a non-profit foundation whose revenue does not depend on its users and that, therefore, it can make that decision more easily than others, but the reality is that for Signal’s expansion plans, considering abandoning a market as important as the UK could be a very important strategic setback.