Meta’s plans to encrypt Messenger risk ‘grotesque betrayal,’ says UK home secretary

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is in the middle of a political battle over the introduction of end-to-end encryption in Messenger. If the company didn't consider child safety while introducing E2EE, it would be a "grotesque betrayal" according to the home secretary. There are likely to be similar arguments in the US.

Meta has been working on adding E2EE to Messenger for a long time, and recently confirmed that it will encrypting all chats and calls on the platform next year. Users can opt-in to E2EE on Messenger on a chat-by-chat basis, but only on the default E2EE platform. The debate about the right way to balance user privacy and safety has been going on for decades. The potential for police to issue search warrants for user chats in order to enforce new abortion laws has heightened these arguments.

Child safety and the dissemination of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, are the two main topics of argument in the UK. Many child molesters use social media platforms such as Facebook to find and molest children. It's important that law enforcement have access to the information they need to identify the children in these images and protect them from vile predators.

The technical heads of GCHQ and the UK's National Cyber Security Centre argue in favor of "client side scanning" as a way to balance user privacy and the needs of law enforcement. This is the same method that Apple was going to use in Messages on iOS before it was scrapped. Clients compare photos and videos on their devices to a list of banned content. Privacy advocates argue that it is possible to expand the list to allow broad and intrusive snooping.

It isn't clear how politically tenable the UK government's demands are. The Online Safety Bill was intended to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online. The Bill has been put on hold because of the resignation of Boris Johnson as party leader and because the government is without a clear agenda at the moment. In the UK, forces are not ready to take the field.