The U.K. government offers prizes for beating Facebook's encryption
The U.K. government is reportedly offering firms over $100,000 each if they can develop technologies that will bypass Facebook’s end-to-end encryption.
The cash awards are the U.K. Home Secretary’s latest salvo in a long-running dispute with the social network over end-to-end encryption. Priti Patel has repeatedly argued that encrypting messaging services makes it harder for law enforcement to track child abusers and terrorists on services such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Under the plans, reported in The Telegraph, the U.K. government will award five organizations up to £85,000 ($117,000) each if they can “develop technologies to keep children safe when using end-to-end encrypted messaging services”, according to the report.
This money will “be awarded based on their potential for innovative solutions to detect images or videos showing sexual abuse of children while ensuring end-to-end encryption is not compromised”. Quite how the firms could intercept the content of messages without breaking encryption is far from clear.
The financial awards, designed to attract “the brightest industry brains” according to The Telegraph are mere pocket change when compared to Facebook’s financial resources.
Facebook’s own bug bounty programme - where the company pays ethical hackers to discover and report bugs in its system - paid out almost $2 million in 2020, dwarfing the offer from the U.K. government. Facebook’s R&D budget was more than $6 billion for the quarter ending June 30 this year alone.
The Facebook ultimatum
The announcement comes on the same day that Priti Patel gives a speech to the G7’s interior ministers, in which she will urge them to give Facebook an ultimatum to abandon plans to add end-to-end encryption to all of its messaging services.
“It is vital that the G7 and technology companies alike step up to protect children and victims from sick perpetrators and crack down on this abhorrent crime,” Patel writes in the newspaper. “The technology giants have a responsibility to protect their users online, and must take our children's safety and security as seriously.”
A Facebook spokesperson said: “Child exploitation has no place on our platforms and Facebook will continue to lead the industry in developing new ways to prevent, detect and respond to abuse.
“End-to-end encryption is already the leading security technology used by many services to keep people safe from hackers and criminals. Its full rollout on our messaging services is a long-term project and we are building strong safety measures into our plans.”
