The US tech conglomerate Meta, WhatsApp has said that it will leave the UK rather than weaken encryption. As the country is upcoming with its Online Safety Bill.
The UK government will be passing its Online Safety Bill later this year. The government has argued that security should be weakened so that messages can be scanned for illegal content.
WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart has said to The Guardian, “We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example. But we’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that.”
“The reality is, our users all around the world want security. Ninety-eight percent 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 that 98% of users”, Will Cathcart added.
“I don’t know that people want to live in a world where to communicate privately to someone it has to be illegal,” he said.
WhatsApp messages are End-to-end encryption. This encryption ensures that the messages are secure and additionally only the sender of the message and the recipient read them.
Chief Will Cathcart has also said that WhatsApp yet not received any notification for encryption. The UK government has not put any demand to remove it.
WhatsApp on the other hand wants the government to be specific in adding the words to the bill so that it would make clear private messaging is different from other social networks.
Additionally, the company wants that encryption should be protected.
