‘British government considers advertising campaign with public stunts against encryption’

The British government is reportedly soon to start an advertising campaign against encryption by tech companies such as Meta. An advertising agency has been hired for this and ‘public stunts’ are being considered with the subject of child safety.

Documents related to the anti-encryption ad campaign have been accessed by Rolling Stone. According to the site, the British government would like to start the campaign sometime this month. The British Home Office has hired M&C Saatchi for this. In addition to advertising in the media, the agency has also made proposals for stunts in public spaces that should influence the public.

According to a presentation, the launch of the campaign will be accompanied by the unveiling of a large screen in a public space, with a counter counting up to 14 million in 24 hours. That number refers to the number of “potential cases of exploitation” that the government believes could occur if end-to-end encryption is expanded.

For another publicity stunt, a glass building would be erected in the public space, containing an adult and a child who are both busy on a smartphone. The adult would occasionally look ‘consciously’ at the child. During the day, the ‘privacy glass’ of the construction will slowly darken, so that outsiders can no longer see the people. That should give bystanders an uneasy feeling about what is going on inside the room. The campaign wants to use this to make a comparison of online communication that is protected.

One of the slides in the proposal would say that much of the public has never heard of end-to-end encryption and that means people can be easily influenced about it. That slide also notes that the campaign should not result in a debate about privacy versus security.

A British government spokesperson confirmed to Rolling Stone that it has engaged M&C Saatchi “to unite the many organizations that share our concerns about the impact of end-to-end encryption on the safety of our children.” It is not known to what extent the proposals in the document will actually be implemented.

Privacy groups have already planned counter-campaigns, according to Rolling Stone, calling the campaign scaremongering. The British government has often criticized the plans of Meta, then Facebook, to enable end-to-end encryption in all its chat programs by default in recent years. For now, this is only the case with WhatsApp.