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SAN FRANCISCO: The head of WhatsApp Will Cathcart has said the company would depart the UK if it’s forced to weaken its encryption standards under the country’s upcoming Online Safety Bill.
WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart talking to media the other day said “It’s a global product; there isn’t a way to change it in just one part of the world,” Cathcart said. “We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example. We’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that.”
Western media including The Guardian, Politico, and Wired, have criticized the legislation as the most concerning set of online regulations in the Western world.
The bill, introduced by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is an attempt to force internet companies to remove illegal content such as child sexual abuse or terrorism. However, critics including Meta have said scanning for such content would be incompatible with the end-to-end encryption that is a common protection offered by messenger apps.
“We’ve recently been blocked in Iran, for example. But we’ve never seen a liberal democracy do that,” said Cathcart.
“The reality is, our users all around the world want security. 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,” he said.
WhatsApp’s warning follows similar threats from another encrypted messaging app, Signal. The president of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, said last month that the company “would absolutely 100 percent walk [away from the UK] rather than ever undermine the trust that people place in us to provide a truly private means of communication.”
