Thousands of Popular Websites Leaking Secrets
06-Sep-23
A contentious provision in the UK government’s upcoming online safety bill that would have required tech companies to eavesdrop on users’ communications appears to have been dropped. The massive piece of legislation’s Clause 110 grants the regulator Ofcom the authority to require message providers to carry out so-called “client-side scanning” using “accredited technology.”
In order to compare the contents of messages to a database of child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) content, they would have to scan messages before they are end-to-end encrypted. This put the government and tech behemoths like WhatsApp and Signal on a collision course. If the bill was passed in its current form, they vowed to stop providing services in the UK, claiming it would be impossible to establish a system that would
