WhatsApp could disappear from UK over privacy concerns

The UK government risks entering into a confrontation with the messenger WhatsApp, as a result of which the service may completely leave the country.

At the centre of the row is the online safety bill, a vast piece of legislation that will touch on almost every aspect of online life in Britain. More than four years in the making, with eight secretaries of state and five prime ministers involved in its drafting, the bill, which is progressing through the House of Lords, is more than 250 pages long. The table of contents alone spans 10 pages, the Guardian writes.

The bill imposes requirements for social networks to use technology to tackle terrorism or child sexual abuse content, with fines of up to 10 per cent of global turnover for those services that do not comply. But for messaging apps that secure their user data with “end-to-end encryption” (E2EE), it is technologically impossible to read user messages without fundamentally breaking their promises to users.

If push came to shove, they say, they would choose to protect the security of their non-UK users.

“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 per cent of users,” WhatsApp’s chief Will Cathcart told the Guardian in March.