Security News > 2022 > January > Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption
2022-01-20 15:06

The British government's PR campaign to destroy popular support for end-to-end encryption on messaging platforms has kicked off, under the handle "No Place To Hide", and it's as broad as any previous attack on the safety-guaranteeing technology.

Judging by videos earnestly distributed by organisations supporting it, the No Place To Hide campaign is much wider than merely targeting Facebook Messenger as was previously thought.

It could mean social media platforms no longer being able to detect cases of child sexual abuse and no longer being able to report it to the police.

Inevitably, smart people have fought back - with one buying up an unclaimed domain name similar to the official No Place To Hide site and pointing those at informative material explaining the benefits of E2EE. Thus noplacetohide.

Lest anyone reading this gets the idea that the UK government has a point about E2EE protecting paedophiles, the technology does far more than that and the government is deliberately omitting this information.

Your mobile banking app uses E2EE; online chats with HMRC are protected through E2EE; you'd no more have an unsecured web chat with the taxman's helpdesk than read out your P60 in the middle of a shopping centre.


News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/01/20/no_place_hide_campaign_anti_e2ee_ukgov/