The Online Safety Bill doesn’t explicitly ban or limit encryption, and the government has given statements indicating that it supports the technology. But the point of end-to-end encryption is precisely that those platforms can’t see that content.

If social media platforms are going to be required to act on the content that is being shared on them, then they need to know what it is. What does encryption have to do with the Online Safety Bill? That in turn means they cannot give those messages over to anybody else, such as law enforcement.

That works by ensuring that only the sender and recipient of a message (or really their devices) have the key that can open a message, and so only they can read them.īecause it is end-to-end, that encryption keeps even the services themselves from reading messages. It protects everything from internet banking information as it is sent over the internet to the data stored on people’s phones.īut the really controversial bit at the moment – and for the past few years – is end-to-end encryption in messaging services. It has been used for centuries and it has been an important and sometimes controversial part of computing for decades. What is encryption?Įncryption really just means encoding information so that it can only be read by people with a code.

But chief among those controversies is the worry about encryption. It has proven controversial in a variety of ways, including the extra powers it gives to regulator Ofcom over technology platforms. They will be required to stop such content from appearing, or remove it quickly when it does, for instance. Much of that will be achieved by putting more responsibility on technology platforms for the kind of content they host. That includes content that is illegal – such as child sexual abuse and terrorism – as well as “harmful” content such as pornography and bullying. The legislation attempts to address what ministers claim are a host of dangers that are posed by the internet, to both adults and children. What is the point of the Online Safety Bill?

Encrypted text app