WhatsApp may be banned in the UK after newly proposed law

A new bill could: What’s up leave England. Under the guidance of the House of Lords, the legislature has been discussing for years the creation of measures based on a policy of moderation for such messengers.

The purpose of the UK Communications Office (Ofcom) is to establishing a set of rules for monitoring terrorist acts or pedophilia on social media by the law called Online Security Bill. If companies fail to comply with such regulation, they can be fined up to 10% of their total revenue.

But for apps like WhatsApp, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Because these platforms use encrypted messaging technology, it is very complex to read messages from all users. In addition, the great appeal of these apps is, privacy for the usersomething that great techs should not give up.

In an open letter written by WhatsApp and Signal last month, the companies understand that “if implemented as written, Ofcom could circumvent the purpose of encryption by trying to force proactive scanning of private messages on its end-to-end encrypted communications services.” endangering the privacy of all users”.

If the project continues, Messengers like WhatsApp likely to leave the country. In a statement to the newspaper GuardThe app’s manager, Will Cathcart, says 98% of the platform’s users are from outside the UK.

“They don’t want us to lower the security of the product, and it would be an odd choice for us to lower it in a way that affects 98% of users,” Cathcart said.

The UK government is already aware of this possibility and there is an internal understanding that previous statements were not just a bluff. But the proposal has been working on it since 2019 and includes more than 250 pages. If implemented, apps will need to develop new technologies to comply with the law.