The U.K. Government Is Very Close To Eroding Encryption Worldwide
www.eff.org
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...

cross-posted from: https://monyet.cc/post/153506

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.

  • phi1997@kbin.social
    55·
    1 year ago

    I’m surprised banks haven’t stepped in. They wouldn’t help for the good of the world, but this would destroy online commerce and banking.

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      152·
      1 year ago

      Why would banks step in? All your financial data is already accessible to the government.

      I doubt any of these efforts will break TLS, in-transit, or any at rest type of encryption. They’re goal is to break E2E “zero access” encryption, and it’s usage by commoners. The data and services they can’t already gain access to… Even if they did, politicians will absolve their capital handlers the same as they always absolve themselves, because they’re criminally corrupt corporate removed.

      • bighi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        32·
        1 year ago

        Not because they care about the government. Because they care about hackers.

        Creating encryption backdoors for the government means creating encryption backdoors for hackers. Because once encryption is weakened, it’s weakened.

        • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Again, they aren’t going to break the encryption that corporations use, because the laws they pass are ghost written by corporations. Multinationals aren’t going to abandon their own security and dramatically increase their risk because some UK oligarchs go off the deep end.

          They will only break the encryption that the proles use, because this is only about increasing control, power, data mining, and profits.

      • TenderfootGungi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        London was Europe’s banking center. Post Brexit much of it has moved to other EU countries, but there are still large teams in London handling investments all over Europe.