Privacy – one of the most fundamental rights in any free society – is under threat from the U.K. Government’s Online Safety Bill, which is currently making its way through the House of Lords, writes Conservative MP David Davis in Spiked. The central issue is the undermining of encryption. Here’s an excerpt.
Encryption might sound like a niche technical term, but it lies at the heart of communication in the modern world. Anyone who uses WhatsApp, Signal or similar apps benefits from it. Journalists, whistleblowers and political dissidents all rely on it. And so does our financial system. Without encryption, transactions and trades would be incredibly vulnerable.
What’s more, our national security depends on encryption. It allows the sharing of sensitive military and intelligence information. The dangers of having lax privacy protections have been laid bare in numerous scandals in the past couple of decades, most recently the leak of Pentagon documents about the war in Ukraine.
Despite this, the Government wants to weaken our privacy protections. Its stated justification is that it wants to tackle child abuse online. That is a noble aim, but the bill would mean companies will have to find ways to stop users encountering harmful content in private messages. That is a problem, because it will probably force those companies to check all private messages on their platforms.
Read more: The End of Online Privacy
