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What 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 th
by jupp0r 4y ago
What 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 agoPeople didn't use to be so stupid. If they could manage Word Perfect 5.1 they can surely sideload a little app :P I think it's more of a "don't want to know" than anything, in which case it's their own problem IMO.
- jhasse 4y agoNot phone makers, but Google and Apple. You wouldn't find the app in their App Stores in the UK.
- anigbrowl 4y agoIf it's a criminal statute, the UK could fine Signal and the US would help them collect. https://irp.fas.org/world/uk/us-uk-mla.pdf https://irp.fas.org/world/uk/us-uk-mla.pdf
- amadeuspagel 4y agoMaybe the treaty's exception for offenses of a political character applies here?
- anigbrowl 4y agoI doubt that. Signal themselves say they can't read the content of messages, so the UK prosecutors could argue that they're not being targeted over the content of the messages but the fact of enabling their concealment. Recall that in the US there is no explicit right to privacy. You might be able to make a 1A argument that manually encrypting a message is itself a speech act, but the government could theoretically ban the distribution tools like Signal and argue they have the authority under the commerce clause, which stands on a equal Constitutional footing to the 1A. I don't think this is likely, but I could easily see it being offered as the justification to honor a UK ban.
- nicoburns 4y agoYeah, app store releases are per-region. They'd just untick the UK region.