Why the tech industry needs to stand firm on preserving end-to-end encryption

Restricting end-to-end encryption on a single-country basis would not only be absurdly difficult to enforce, but it would also fail to deter criminal activity

01 Aug 2025 • , 5 min. read

The UK Government wants access, when requested, to the end-to-end encrypted messages and data for everyone in the UK. The reasons are to specifically tackle serious crimes, such as terrorism and child sex abuse. The UK Government is not alone in this, of course, as other countries are also grappling with how to address similar problems in their own jurisdictions.

To enforce such a requirement, however, tech companies would need to provide a backdoor – something that is either highly unlikely or never going to happen, at least according to the current stance of most tech companies. The alternative would be to have specific app developers comply with the requirement, but this would only work for local apps tied to a ...