This article is
completely wrong, and almost sabotages the fight against the UK Online Safety Bill, given it claims a victory that simply doesn't exist, and so lures everyone into a false sense of complacency. The UK govt must be ecstatic that they have changed
nothing and yet the tech industry seems to believe that they've won something.
All the govt said was "we'll only force scanning when it's "technically feasible" to do so" - i.e. when someone believes the CSAM scanning quality is high enough beyond some given threshold. It's still scanning though, and still fundamentally undermines encryption; it's just potentialy delaying the implementation a bit... having enabled it in law. The thing we should be fighting is enabling it in law.
Politico just published an article which nailed it: https://www.politico.eu/article/whatsapp-signal-meta-faceboo...
> "On Wednesday, Whittaker and other privacy campaigners falsely claimed that London was pulling back from its bid to access encrypted messages"
Likewise, the Government has spelt out very clearly that they consider absolutely nothing to have changed: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66716502
dang: it's almost worth flagging this thread as being based on entirely incorrect data. For whatever reason, the desire to make progress on this issue means that folks have jumped the gun and are prematurely celebrating a win which is not a win, and thus undermining the whole campaign to protect encryption.