Facebook

(asked on 6th February 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of Facebook's plans to introduce encrypted messages across its messaging applications.


Answered by
Baroness Barran Portrait
Baroness Barran
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This question was answered on 17th February 2020

The UK Government is in favour of strong encryption: it is critical to protect UK citizens’ data online and billions of people use it every day for a range of services including banking, commerce and communications.

Facebook’s encryption proposals as they stand would have a serious impact on the vital work Facebook currently does to tackle the most serious illegal content and activity on its platform, including child sexual exploitation and abuse and terrorism.

Under the new Online Harms legislation, a duty of care will make platforms take more responsibility for the safety of their users, and tackle harm caused by content or activity on their services.

Facebook should not implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety and without including a means for law enforcement to obtain lawful access to the content of communications. We are committed to working with Facebook to ensure it meets its responsibility to keep users safe, and those conversations are in progress.

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