Online Safety Bill: Apple voices concerns about message scanning

The tech giant becomes the latest to add its voice to those concerned that weakening encryption will ultimately prove damaging to everyone.

Apple has become the latest provider of encrypted messaging to express deep reservations about the UK Online Safety Bill which is making slow progress through parliament. In a statement, Apple said:

"End-to-end encryption is a critical capability that protects the privacy of journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats. It also helps everyday citizens defend themselves from surveillance, identity theft, fraud, and data breaches.

"The Online Safety Bill poses a serious threat to this protection, and could put UK citizens at greater risk."

The statement from Apple comes at the same time as an open letter from the digital privacy and free speech advocates Open Rights Group expressing similar concerns. WhatsApp and Signal have also recently expressed their unhappiness with the proposed legislation, stating that they will not comply with it, even if that means withdrawing from the UK market entirely.

The part of the bill sparking these concerns relates to clauses which would allow Ofcom to compel communications providers to implement client-side scanning (CSS.) CSS could be mandated when people are trying to share content known to be illegal, images of child sexual abuse being one of the key targets of this sort of action.

The objection expressed by Apple, and so many other tech companies and privacy campaigners is that this scanning would weaken end-to-end encryption altogether and essentially render it useless as a privacy tool. If governments can access your private messages they are not private.

The government told the BBC that "companies should only implement end-to-end encryption if they can simultaneously prevent abhorrent child sexual abuse on their platforms.

"We will continue to work with them to seek solutions to combat the spread of child sexual abuse material while maintaining user privacy."

The government response to the BBC illustrates perfectly the misunderstanding that its position is based on - and that is that surveillance of criminals is possible whilst also maintaining privacy for law-abiding citizens. The tech community maintains that this is not possible. Either everybody has privacy or nobody does. It really is that simple.

The Online Safety Bill is currently at the report stage before its third and final reading in the House of Lords. Campaigners are urging peers to accept an amendment to the bill which removes the word ‘privately' from the legislation. This will prevent the enforced surveillance of the private chats of millions of users.

Apple also supports the idea of amended legislation.

"Apple urges the government to amend the bill to protect strong end-to-end encryption for the benefit of all."