London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Tuesday, Oct 14, 2025

Priti Patel v Facebook is the latest in a 30-year fight over encryption

Priti Patel v Facebook is the latest in a 30-year fight over encryption

Governments have been clashing with tech companies for decades over user privacy
Priti Patel has stepped up an international campaign to force Facebook to reverse its plans to merge its messaging apps and encrypt all communications between users, arguing such plans make it harder to safeguard children. But despite the intensity of the home secretary’s call for action, there’s little new ground broken in the encryption wars.

“We cannot allow a situation where law enforcement’s ability to tackle abhorrent criminal acts and protect victims is severely hampered,” Patel told an event organised by the NSPCC children’s charity on Monday afternoon. “Simply removing accounts from platforms is nowhere near enough.”

Her comments are the latest push in a fight that goes back almost 30 years. The broad issue is the same as ever: governments and law enforcement are worried about what is being said on communications platforms they cannot easily monitor, while technology companies argue that the nature of encryption means they have to provide privacy for everyone or no one.

This time, though, the territory is slightly different. Facebook’s decision in 2020 to begin merging its various messaging platforms has added a sense of urgency. The move, which started when Messenger and Instagram merged in August, will eventually put those two platforms and WhatsApp all on the same network, with all chats being encrypted between them.

In a statement, Facebook said: “Child exploitation has no place on our platforms and Facebook will continue to lead the industry in developing new ways to prevent, detect and respond to abuse. End-to-end encryption is already the leading security technology used by many services to keep people safe from hackers and criminals. Its full rollout on our messaging services is a long term project and we are building strong safety measures into our plans.”

Hard as it is to convince technology companies to turn off encryption, it may be somewhat easier to convince them not to turn it on in the first place. And the NSPCC hopes that that conversation will be more successful if it avoids the same mistakes its precursors took. “We want to move away from this being seen as a vexing unresolvable tradeoff of an argument that pits the needs and the wishes of adults against those of children,” says Andy Burrows, the head of the charity’s Online Harms project. “What we want to move towards is a reset that results in a settlement that can balance the privacy and safety needs of all users.”

What that settlement would look like is unclear. The government has not repeated last decade’s calls to push for a law-enforcement-only backdoor into encrypted messaging apps, after such a demand was roundly rejected by an industry as technologically impossible. (The nature of end-to-end encryption, which prevents anyone but the sender and recipient from reading communications, is such that any backdoor would work not just for police but for anyone else who discovered it, from hackers to foreign intelligence agencies.)

Instead, the UK government and others have focused on their goals, rather than demanding specific methods to achieve them. “During my own recent discussions with my counterparts in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, we were absolutely united and calling upon the industry to ensure that services are safe by design,” Patel said. “Companies themselves should do more, and can do more, to endorse and transparently implement the CFAA voluntary principles on child sexual abuse,” she added, referring to the new set of guidelines published last year by the five countries calling for better protection of children online.

However, Jim Killock, the executive director of the Open Rights Group, still sees the calls as “a kind of solutionism: people picking a particular way of solving a problem and saying: ‘This is how we must do things, this is the only way that we can deliver this result, it has to be this way.’”

“It is clear,” Killock adds, “that the privacy and security of both children and adults is served by security technologies including end-to-end encryption. So the question is: are there other ways to deal with the very real issues around circulation of child abuse material?”
Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
Australian Prime Minister’s Private Number Exposed Through AI Contact Scraper
Ex-Microsoft Engineer Confirms Famous Windows XP Key Was Leaked Corporate License, Not a Hack
China’s lesson for the US: it takes more than chips to win the AI race
Australia Faces Demographic Risk as Fertility Falls to Record Low
California County Reinstates Mask Mandate in Health Facilities as Respiratory Illness Risk Rises
Israel and Hamas Agree to First Phase of Trump-Brokered Gaza Truce, Hostages to Be Freed
French Political Turmoil Elevates Marine Le Pen as Rassemblement National Poised for Power
China Unveils Sweeping Rare Earth Export Controls to Shield ‘National Security’
The Davos Set in Decline: Why the World Economic Forum’s Power Must Be Challenged
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
×