“We’re doing everything we can to support the police in their work against crime,” Meta’s head of policy in Sweden, Janne Elvelid, told journalist Emanuel Karlsten, who first reported the story, in a written comment.
“But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to compromise on safety and privacy for our users. We’re willing to accept that our services may not be available everywhere or in every country if that is the price for keeping our promise to users that our chat services will be secure.”
This is the first time Meta has spoken publicly about the proposed Swedish law.
Whatsapp has in recent years marketed itself as a place for secure communication, using among other things a protocol developed by Signal, a non-profit secure messaging app which offers private and encrypted communication to its users.
The Swedish Armed Forces, which criticised the new proposal when it was sent out for consultation, recently announced that it would be switching to Signal for open, non-classified communication with mobile phones.
Signal has also pledged to pull out of Sweden if the law comes into effect.
It's not yet clear if Messenger, which is also owned by Meta, would also exit Sweden. The Swedish Internet Foundation's most recent Svenskarna och Internet (Swedes and the Internet) report showed that Messenger is the most popular messaging app among Swedes, with 41 percent using it every day and 55 percent using it every week.
Whatsapp was the second-most popular messaging app among Swedes in 2024, with 18 percent of Swedes using it every day or 28 percent every week.
What is the law about?
The idea behind the law is that Swedish authorities should be able to access Swedes’ messages and emails in emergency situations, for example crises, war or major crimes.
In practice, this means that authorities would be able to demand information on who a person in question had communicated with, as well as what they said or wrote. App owners would also need to keep certain data for up to two years in case the Swedish authorities need to access it in the future.
It would also require major companies to create a form of key to allow authorities to access encrypted information, which has led to the law being referred to in the media as a bakdörrslag or “back door law”.
Currently, apps such as Messenger, Whatsapp and Signal offer end-to-end encryption, which essentially means that the only person who can read a message you send is the receiver themselves – not even the companies themselves can read what you send.
A back door key would allow the state to read this information, if it so wished, while also creating a weak point in the apps which could open them up to hacking attempts.
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