The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging services, which will destroy end-to-end encryption. No amendments have been accepted that would mitigate the bill’s most dangerous elements.
If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself. Requiring government-approved software in peoples’ messaging services is an awful precedent. If the Online Safety Bill becomes British law, the damage it causes won’t stop at the borders of the U.K.
The sprawling bill, which originated in a white paper on “online harms” that’s now more than four years old, would be the most wide-ranging internet regulation ever passed. At EFF, we’ve been clearly speaking about its disastrous effects for more than a year now.
It would require content filtering, as well as age checks to access erotic content. The bill also requires detailed reports about online activity to be sent to the government. Here, we’re discussing just one fatally flawed aspect of OSB—how it will break encryption.