Yesterday the Online Safety Bill was taken through the House of Lords for the final time. On this reading the contentious requirement for companies such as Apple, Meta, Signal to provide a “backdoor” into the end to end encryption of messages that would allow the government to snoop on messages sent and received by UK citizens was amended.

In a watering down that amounts to the government conceeding defeat they changed the requirement to only apply when it became “technically possible” for messaging providers to achieve it (there is no way this will ever happen…)

I don’t think this should come as a great surprise to anyone really, especially as Apple, Meta and Signal had all written to the government informing them that if the bill went ahead as planned they would remove their services from UK citizens. That would be a great vote winner for the Conservatives in the run up to the next general election now wouldn’t it ?