Will Big Tech defend our privacy in the face of government snooping?
An interesting article on the BBC website, “Why US tech giants are threatening to quit the UK”, questions the seriousness of US companies such as Meta or Signal that have threatened to leave the UK market if the Online Safety Bill is passed this fall. The Conservative government’s legislative package would require companies offering products with end-to-end encryption to provide a way to decrypt them if legally required to do so.
This is not a new issue: four years ago, at a meeting of the group of countries known as Five Eyes (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), ministers expressed concerns about the growth of WhatsApp as an encrypted communication tool and there was talk of “making sure that our legal system and our security and intelligence agencies can get legal and exceptional access to the information they need”, a possibility that has also been expressed in meetings of the European Union and that seems to have the support of current rotating president Spain.
The companies that manage these services are totally opposed to this type of legislation, and both Meta and Signal, as well as Apple, have made clear their refusal to build in any type of backdoor in their products. In the case of the British Online Safety Bill, both companies have openly spoken of the…
