What is Meta doing here? I’m not clear on what the point being made is.
If you’re insinuating that they are doing this to artificially inflate user counts, why wouldn’t they be reporting about how there are 2+ billion threads users in the first week?
They don’t need to manufacture hype - like Meta or not, in the first 96 hours they brought in almost 100 million users. Thats a third of Twitter’s entire active user base, in less than a week.
It’s because the proposed changes would give the UK government de-facto authority to dictate how security and encryption are implemented.
It would mean in practice that the UK would dictate how Apple employs encryption around the globe, unless Apple was willing to fork their software and build/maintain a UK-only branch for their products.
Which still wouldn’t solve the issue because if you interacted with someone over any of those protocols who was in the UK, your messages and data would be accessible by the UK government, regardless of the other party’s location.
I’m with Apple on this. This isn’t a consumer-focused piece of legislation for repairability/interoperability like some of the newer EU legislation, this is a government trying to ensure they have the technical ability to spy on their citizens and others. It’s the definition of anti-consumer.