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“If the company refused to do, it could face fines of up to 4% of its parent company Meta’s annual turnover – unless it pulled out of the UK market entirely.”
by mariojv 4y ago
“If the company refused to do, it could face fines of up to 4% of its parent company Meta’s annual turnover – unless it pulled out of the UK market entirely.”
Wow. I wonder if it got to that point if Meta would change course and disable end to end encryption for UK users and people messaging UK users, if that would be sufficient to comply. If this lobbying causes the UK to change course, I wonder what impact that would have on other countries’ attempts to weaken encryption, if any other such attempts are happening.
- Kim_Bruning 4y agoThey say that 98% of users are outside the UK (and those users very likely won't want reduced encryption), so whatsapp would probably just exit the UK.
- brundolf 4y agoI know in some non-US countries, WhatsApp is the default way of communicating (like SMS is in the US). Is that true in the UK? That could put significant pressure on the government
- lewispollard 4y agoEveryone I know here (UK) uses WhatsApp as their default communication tool. I have a few friends using Signal or Telegram, but I'd say WhatsApp is by and large the default, at least for my social circle.
- jupp0r 4y agoIt's relatively easy for people to switch, compared to other social networks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- twelve40 4y agoWhat?? if all your contacts are on messenger X, it's easy for you to switch to messenger Y? and do what there, message yourself? It's exactly as hard as any other social network! P.S. I'm always shocked how people suggest "just use Signal" or something, it's really not up to me what to pick what to use at all, but up to the people I'm trying to connect with. It seems like a very difficult concept for the "just use Signal" crowd to grasp.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y agoWell that's reciprocal, isn't it? You can either be the guy who accommodates all your friends' networks by having accounts everywhere, or you could instead be the guy who's only using Signal, so anyone who wants to stay in touch with you had better get on Signal!
- hackernewds 4y agoShort answer: yes Switching costs are free.
- Digit-Al 4y agoSignal said they may have to pull out of the UK if the bill is enacted as well. This would be a major setback for communications here. We'd basically have to go back to SMS/MMS and email as far as I can tell. I don't know this is a fight the UK government can win. Does anyone else remember that the American government tried to ban encryption (back in the 90's I think it was)? They eventually had to give up because people just downloaded encryption products from the internet and used them anyway.
- jupp0r 4y agoWhat does it mean for Signal to "pull out" of the UK? How can the UK government enforce this law against an app whose makers have no physical presence inside the country? Force phone makers to ban the app from app stores?
- OJFord 4y agoNo +44 number sign-up, no listing in UK app stores.
- wkat4242 4y agoJust take a foreign prepay number and sideload the app :) It won't really stop people.
- OJFord 4y ago1) are you joking, that will stop 99. some number of 9s % of the population; 2) I'm not making any claims about it being desirable or effective, I'm just explaining what 'exiting the UK' means or what they'd be required to do. The crown won't sue a foreign company because a citizen found a way to workaround it not being available here - that would be like criticising the manufactuter of an illegally dangerous electrical item only rated for and sold in 110V markets that someone imported.
- wkat4242 4y ago
- Jcampuzano2 4y agoBasically everywhere in Latin America you practically could not survive without using WhatsApp, it is that prevalent. It is used for everything from personal communication to business communication.
- pjc50 4y agoIt's the default way of communicating for politicians that are making this law. Of course, they probably don't see the value of E2E encryption because their messages are inevitably leaked by a defector in the group chat.
- baby 4y agoI live in the bay area in the US and whatsapp is the default way of communicating here as well
- SllX 4y agoNot as default as you might think. I made the attempt to get some non-technical friends on WhatsApp years back, and near as I can tell, none of them are on it at all. In fact, most of them never stopped using Snapchat and iMessage is basically dominant.
- brundolf 4y agoInteresting. I live in Texas and I've used it like... once, many years ago (haven't had it installed on my last two phones). Defaults for me and mine are SMS (iMessage when available), Discord, and then I've got a couple people on Signal
- JohnFen 4y agoInteresting. I'm not in the bay area, but I am in the US. I use whatsapp, but purely to talk with my friends who are in Europe. None of my bay area friends (or anywhere else in the US) are using it.
- tengwar2 4y agoNo. It's a common way of communicating, as are email and SMS. Telegram and Signal are less common. There is however a peculiar bubble effect whereby WhatsApp users tend to think that because all their friends use WhatsApp to communicate with them, it is more dominant than is actually the case. It's the same effect as "everyone is on FaceBook/Twitter/Instagram....".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- alfiopuglisi 4y agoI don't know about the UK, but in Italy everyone is on WhatsApp, grandparents included, and without it the country would shut down in a couple of hours. In addition, Italians create WhatsApp group chats for everything. Heck, my sport club has three separate whatsapp groups: a general one, one for the senior's team, and a third one to broadcast official information.
- edgyquant 4y agoI doubt that the nation would shit down. But this doesn’t mean we should let WhatsApp do what it pleases.
- nicoburns 4y agoI would say that WhatsApp is probably the most commonly used chat app in the UK. But most people are also using at least one other chat service such as Facebook Messenger or Instagram's messages. And of course due to the way WhatsApp uses phone numbers as an id, most people also have people's phone numbers and can fall back to SMS if need be.
- andylynch 4y agoYes - especially for politicians - although looking at what’s currently leaking in certain UK newspapers one would think they would already be pushing for /more/ privacy on WhatApp rather than less.
- wkat4242 4y agoMost of the leaks come from the political community itself of course. Either to gather the response to a particular measure without sticking out their neck to actually propose it, or to thwart opponents.
- 323 4y agoUK politicians themselves use WhatsApp a lot. They will strike the law down a day after WhatsApp stops working in UK. 2 days after there will be massive public outrage since everybody uses WhatsApp in UK. It's an empty threat, just like the internet porn law.
- TillE 4y agoThat last bit is exactly right. The UK has proposed all sorts of plainly moronic online restrictions, which never actually get implemented. They simply don't have the clout to push around enormous American companies. It's a tiny country. If the EU or US were proposing such a law, you should take it seriously, but this is just a joke.
- eertami 4y agoBecause these proposals are never intended to be implemented. It is an anchor, which is intentionally ridiculous and outrageous, so that when the next slightly less severe proposal is made it doesn't sound as bad as the previous one. It's very transparent but also standard operating procedure for the current UK government.
- mokash 4y agoindeed, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
- fidgewidge 4y agoIt's a country with 20% of the population of the USA. That's not exactly a tiny country. > If the EU or US were proposing such a law, you should take it seriously Judging from a few quick searches, there are more Facebook employees in the UK than in Ireland which is their main base of EU operations. They also have a presence in Switzerland (also not EU). FB apparently have some employees in Germany to comply with local hate speech laws, do marketing and HR work, but it doesn't seem like anything they'd miss much if they had to exit especially as they're laying people off anyway. Now that said, I think Meta can win against the UK govt if they want to duke it out but the idea that the UK is a "tiny country" vs the EU is not reflective of Meta's actual exposure. The EU is not a particularly attractive place for tech firms to hire.
- jbverschoor 4y agoWhich entity? I'm not sure the UK would have the mandate to fine a foreign company who's not operating in the UK. They'd just create a company whatsapp UK, license technology, have no other links to meta and have a revenue of about 0.
- tengwar2 4y agoThe UK government can legally fine any company doing business in the UK. It can probably fine any company anywhere. A financial fiction that "WhatsApp UK" had nothing to do with Meta is not going to affect that. It's just collection that is the problem, but I would imagine that they would go after Meta's UK advertising revenue.
- robertlagrant 4y agoWhat does doing business mean in terms of WhatsApp?
- BrandoElFollito 4y agoThe risk of US retaliation is too high. The US routinely use similar bully techniques against their partners (in Iran for instance, pour EU comptines asked the EU commission for help but ultimately we retracted from Iran as asked by the US). They are powerful enough to do that, we (countries in the EU) are not.