Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
Polling finds two-thirds don’t trust this government, or any future one, with access to their encrypted chats
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 Apple challenged the order, and while the US government later said Britain had withdrawn its demand for access to Americans’ encrypted data, reports have since suggested another TCN was issued focusing on British users.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. ®
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Polling finds two-thirds don’t trust this government, or any future one, with access to their encrypted chats
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