Online Safety Bill: WhatsApp, Signal issue final warning against mass snooping

The heads of three major messaging apps have exclusively told The Standard that the Online Safety Bill, which is facing one of it’s final votes this week, will lead to the mass surveillance of every private online message and London’s reputation as a place to do business will be destroyed if the bill passes into law.

They also say Prime Minister Rishi Sunak can forget about the UK becoming a technology superpower if that happens, as tech firms will leave London and no one will want to start a business here.

Last week, the Government proposed a series of new amendments to the Online Safety Bill, which include the possibility of criminal liability for senior technology executives.

“It’s going to be an incredibly chilling effect on the whole London tech scene,” Elements’ chief executive and chief technology Matthew Hodgson told The Standard.

“If I’m going to start a company, I’m not going to do it in London anymore — I’ll go somewhere else because they’re not going to lock me up if someone decides to do something horrible to someone else on my platform.”

Things are really shifting right now. We were caught in a relatively stable period for almost a decade, using the same few apps - but everyone's now making huge missteps. Reddit and Twitter are (maybe) collapsing, FB is moribound. Amazon became flooded with lowquality fakes and false reviews, Google search can't find anything etc. etc. These sort of laws (also GDPR etc.) increasing the burden of newer sites while also hitting established ones appear to throw a wrench into the works too.

This seems like the perfect time for new solutions to emerge! (Federation seems to be going nowhere (unable to actually handle hosting at scale).) Myself, I've returned to HN for the first time in many years and have been finding thriving young communities which almost remind me of my childhood. What a type to be alive!

As someone who works in tech in the UK, this is very scary to me.

The government must back down and ideally apologise.

This will have subtle effects on the sector irregardless of what they do now.