WhatsApp has made a statement stating that it will not comply with the regulations announced under the UK Online Safety Act. Will Cathcart, CEO of WhatsApp, told the BBC that the company owned by Meta will not reduce its security following any government orders. In other words, he underlined that user messages will not be allowed to be read, even if there is a request from the government.
The Online Safety Act aims to detect legal but harmful activities, abuse and harassment. However, due to the uncertain political situation in England, the enactment of this law was delayed. It would also allow the government to detect photos showing child sexual abuse by scanning private messages and violating the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) policies of many social media platforms, including WhatsApp.
“Client-side scanning cannot realistically work,” Cathcart told the BBC. “If we had to reduce security for the world to meet the requirement in a single country, it would be very foolish for us to accept that, and it would make our product less attractive to 98% of our users because of the 2% requirements.”
Cathcart also stated that hundreds of illegal child abuse photos have already been detected on WhatsApp.
Claiming that the bill proposes platforms to read users’ messages directly or indirectly, Cathcart concluded his statement by saying, “I don’t think people want that.”
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