Brits have delivered a fairly unambiguous verdict on giving the government access to their encrypted messages: no, thanks.
New polling commissioned by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) found that 93 percent of British adults believe they have a right to private conversations online, while 89 percent think nobody should be able to access their personal messages without a court order.
Perhaps more awkwardly for Westminster, two-thirds said they would not trust either the current government or any future one with the power to access encrypted messages.
That distrust crosses political lines. Among people who voted in the 2024 general election, 58 percent of Labour voters said they wouldn't trust any government with the power, alongside 59 percent of Conservatives, 56 percent of Liberal Democrats, 69 percent of Greens and 75 percent of Reform voters.
Public First did the asking, polling 2,000 British adults for CDT in April and weighting the results to reflect the wider population. The margin of error is 2.2 percentage points.
The findings land as the UK government's appetite for slurping encrypted data continues to collide with the tech industry's insistence that encryption works best when nobody has a spare key lying around.
That fight became particularly public when Apple withdrew Advanced Data Protection from UK users after receiving a secret Technical Capability Notice (TCN) under the Investigatory Powers Act. Apple challenged the order, and while the US government later said Britain had withdrawn its demand for access to Americans' encrypted data, reports have since suggested another TCN was issued focusing on British users.
Despite the international row, 55 percent of those polled hadn't heard about the Apple notice at all. Once presented with the idea, enthusiasm remained thin.
Just 12 percent backed the government being able to secretly order companies to provide access to users' information while preventing those companies from revealing the order. A third said the government shouldn't have that power at all, while another 41 percent wanted greater transparency or parliamentary oversight.
Nor were respondents particularly sold on sacrificing security for law enforcement. 53 percent said the security risks of accessing encrypted messages outweighed the benefits, compared with 28 percent who thought the benefits came out on top.
The reasons will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the encryption debate for more than five minutes. 84 percent worried that mechanisms allowing access to encrypted messages could introduce vulnerabilities for hackers and criminals, while 82 percent were concerned the powers could be abused.
Knowing someone might be watching could also change how people behave. 65 percent said they'd become more cautious about what they liked, shared or commented on, while 41 percent said they'd self-censor criticism of public institutions or government officials.
CDT is not a disinterested observer: the digital rights group campaigns for strong encryption and commissioned the research as part of that work. The polling itself, however, was carried out independently.
Commenting on the research, Jim Killock, executive director of Open Rights Group, said: "The British public instinctively know that being able to communicate privately is crucial to our individuality and to the survival of a free and open society.
"The government persists with the myth that it can weaken encryption to target the bad guys only. Attacks on the security of our phones, security tools and messaging apps harm us all and make our democracy weaker."
None of this is likely to end Westminster's long-running pursuit of encrypted communications. But if ministers were hoping the public was enthusiastically behind them, the numbers suggest otherwise.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AnonTechie on Friday September 04, @09:27AM (4 children)
Many such attempts have failed, and it wouldn't be surprising if the UK's initiative also failed ! Weakened encryption is meaningless, as it affects all, including banking and other secure transactions. I am sure the UK Government realizes that weakened encryption will erode trust in UK institutions. People will always find a way to circumvent these regulations, and it will be difficult to monitor or enforce, especially with the global nature of the Internet !!
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by turgid on Friday September 04, @09:34AM
And I'll just leave this here [bigbrotherwatch.org.uk] too.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04, @01:52PM (2 children)
Erode trust?
You can't erode something that doesn't exist.
As for '..the UK Government realizes..', have you seen the shower of 'hoors and comic singers' we've got sitting in both the Commons and Lords (and the devolved assemblies)?
With a few notable and honourable exceptions, they'd all sell their grannies to whoever supplies them with the modern equivalent of the largest bulging brown envelope.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday September 04, @06:22PM
Faith and a stiff upper lip, patriot! Your patience shall be rewarded. Herr Farage of Clapton [hopenothate.org.uk], Millionaire of the People, will save us.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday September 05, @03:35AM
Last I heard people in the UK are going to the hospital when they are sick, are voting, still consider university degrees a sign of achievement etc. This seems to indicate a high amount of trust in institutions to me.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04, @11:58AM (3 children)
Ah, but those numbers are meaningless. The only numbers that matter are the ones counted at election time, and those numbers suggest otherwise. If people want to protect their rights, they have to vote for a parliament that will assist them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Friday September 04, @12:39PM (1 child)
Therein lies the problem. If all the parties likely to win (Labour, Conservative, Reform) believe this nonsense, that's what we'll end up with. That's how the Great British Public votes and that's that. They can sometimes almost bear to vote in a few Lib Dems in England (where the majority of Parliamentary seats are) but that's about it. Authoritarianism it is.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04, @01:09PM
And that's why I always mock these kinds of stories. When they vote like that, it makes their complaints and these media polls look foolish, to put it nicely. I won't say they have the government they deserve, but they definitely have the government they asked for.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday September 05, @03:38AM
Oh, they want privacy for themselves, just not those turrists, pedophiles etc etc.
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Friday September 04, @05:33PM (1 child)
If only multiple entities banded together to discuss this topic, and their constituent individual members also opposed such access [europa.eu], maybe Britain could join such a confederation and their population could weigh in. Well, we can dream, I guess.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04, @10:18PM
You know they would never join a club that would have them as a member...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rich on Sunday September 06, @11:39AM
This indicates nothing but cluelessness and framing. Someone who actually understood what private communications are about would understand that a court order does not matter with properly secured end-to-end technology. The proper question would have been "Do you want to live under permanent surveillance, with the safeguard that (* minor minions of the) government have to get a court order to tap?"
* (Higher ups, "friendly" spooks around the world, and interested large corporations don't, and to be realistic, "unfriendly" spooks and cybercriminals neither, and large corporations, by means of a "limited singular incident" include AI dataminers.)