WhatsApp, the messaging app belonging to the Meta group (Facebook, Instagram), remains opposed to any legislation requiring it to bypass or weaken the encryption protecting messages exchanged by its two billion users. This is what its boss, Will Cathcart, reminded Le Monde, while the European Union (EU) is developing the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR), a controversial draft regulation to combat child pornography content. Some versions of the bill, which is still under discussion, would oblige platforms like WhatsApp to search for this type of content by inspecting messages sent by their users, in order to report them to the authorities.
"What the proposals would be is that every single private communications center in Europe is scanned by a company. (...) It's kind of like if homebuilders were required to put a camera or a microphone in every home that they build. People would be horrified. And to me, this is the same thing being proposed for digital services," said Cathcart.
All messages (text, photo, video...) exchanged on WhatsApp are protected by end-to-end encryption, meaning that the company cannot read them. Even solutions enabling WhatsApp to maintain this encryption, by inspecting messages directly on the user's phone before they are sent and encrypted, do not satisfy its CEO.
"The whole point of that encryption is that a source can send you a message, or you can call a doctor or you can call a spouse, and only the two of you know what's being said. To go back to the analogy of a camera in the living room: it's the same thing. If you said, I'm going to put a camera in every single citizen's living room, but don't worry, there'll be a piece of software running on the camera that'll decide whether to turn the feed on to law enforcement. You'd immediately have a ton of questions. What's that software? How is it written? What mistakes does it make? Could it be changed to turn on in other circumstances? You're proposing reading everyone's messages or listening to everyone's calls," Cathcart argued.
Cathcart also stressed the actions already taken by his company to combat child pornography content, boasting in particular that by 2022 it had made more reports to the US authorities "than Apple, TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat combined."
According to figures from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the organization to which US companies are obliged to report any possible child pornography content, WhatsApp has in fact, sent just over a million notifications – compared with 937,000 for its competitors – thanks in particular to reports made by its users. "As an encrypted service, we're able to send so many more reports than all these other companies combined. This isn't to say that we're at the perfect number. I think we can keep innovating. But it's just to show that there's so much room for the industry to do more without taking this drastic step of ending privacy online," Cathcart noted.
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