Meredith Whittaker, President of the Signal Foundation, has warned the Government that messaging app Signal would stop providing services in the UK if the Online Safety Bill weakens end-to-end encryption. In an interview with the BBC, Whittaker said, "we would absolutely 100% walk rather than ever undermine the trust that people place in us to provide a truly private means of communication... We have never weakened our privacy promises, and we never would."
The Open Rights Group posted a response: “The spy clause in the Online Safety Bill will give Ofcom the power to ask private companies to scan everyone’s private messages on behalf of the government. Quite simply, it is state-mandated private surveillance of the kind that we see in authoritarian regimes... We urge the government to drop the spy clause now.”
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