The U.K. Parliament is close to passing the Online Safety Bill, which threatens global privacy by allowing backdoors into messaging services, compromising end-to-end encryption. Despite objections, no amendments were accepted. The bill also includes content filtering and surveillance measures. There’s still a chance for lawmakers to protect privacy with an amendment preserving encryption. A recent survey shows the majority of U.K. citizens want strong privacy on messaging apps.
Does anyone know if this is threatening messengers based on federated networks like XMPP as well? Legally and practically?
This is probably not going to answer your question, but the law doesn’t seem to focus on protocols/network topologies, but focuses on providers with certain sizes. So if the protocol is used by large techs, then they might have to do something on their side to comply with the law, depending on etc…
I mean, imagine if non-british companies just went “well, no encryption for you, then.”
And disabled TLS too.
Online Banking would probably just have to… stop.
And a lot of other pages wouldn’t load on most browsers requiring https
Online Banking would probably just have to… stop.
What will happen is usually what happens when the UK government introduces a brain melting stupid law (basically any time they do or say anything).
The government will suddenly find out that all the people that said that their stupid law won’t work, were right, and that it doesn’t work. Shockingly.
Then it will end up getting hastily revised into something moderately functional which will necessitate modifying it to the point at which it effectively doesn’t exist, and we all get on with our lives. Repeat process ad nauseum.
See the porn age verification law. Which never ended up happening.
Or just not support the UK anymore.
I doubt that E2E services will care. Matrix will not change. Just like many other services. They are just insane. You can’t also just break TLS in UK only. haha they are crazy.
Is everyone forgetting that Australia already did this, and it had no effect on anything? No one put backdoors in, none of these tech companies abandoned australia. This is just another scare mongering tactic. It should still be defeated though.
Ignoring the British government is 99% of what makes someone British.
They are forever coming up with stuff like this. And just like your example with Australia, nothing ever happens, because the people who would be required to actually make it happen have no real interest in doing so, and the people who will try to get the law passed are too tech illiterate to be able to tell if it has or not.
