A spokeperson for Meta's hugely popular WhatsApp messaging service has indicated that the UK is at risk of losing access to the service if it does not shelve changes proposed in the long-gestating Online Safety bill.
At the moment, WhatsApp is "end to end encrypted". This means that although messages are stored on Meta's servers, it is impossible for them to read or provide access to them. Only the devices at either end of the conversation have the key to unlock the messages.
The Online Safety bill currently making its way through parliament proposes that providers of encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp open a "back door" that allows "trusted" 3rd parties access to these messages. Breaking the encryption, in other words.
As we have covered before, encryption isn't something you can break "a bit". It either works or it doesn''t. If there's a back door for the "good" guys, then the "bad" guys will find a way in too.
It's on that basis that Meta have suggested they'd rather remove the app from the UK than comply with this proposed law. Their spokesperson said:
“There isn’t a way to change [WhatsApp] in just one part of the world. Some countries have chosen to block it: that’s the reality of shipping a secure product. We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example. But we’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that. Ninety-eight per cent of our users are outside the UK. They do not want us to lower the security of the product, and just as a straightforward matter, it would be an odd choice for us to choose to lower the security of the product in a way that would affect those 98% of users.”
In other words, the UK is too small to be proposing something like this on its own, so they'd rather pull out of the UK than do what we're asking. Alternative messaging app Signal have also already said pretty much the same thing.
The online safety bill is currently expected to return to parliament some time in the summer. Assuming it does, we'll see if this section of it is reassessed before being passed into law. The likely outcry if WhatsApp disappeared would suggest that this provision is likely to be removed, whether lawmakers like it or not.