Poll: Two-Thirds of Britons Do Not Trust Any Government With Encrypted Chats

British adults have delivered a fairly unambiguous verdict on whether the government should be able to read their encrypted messages: no, thanks. New polling commissioned by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) found that 93 percent believe they have a right to private conversations online, and 89 percent say nobody should be able to access their personal messages without a court order.

Distrust crosses party lines

Two-thirds of respondents said they would not trust the current government — or any future one — with the power to access encrypted messages, and the scepticism runs across the political spectrum. Among people who voted in the 2024 general election, 58 percent of Labour voters said they would not trust any government with that power, along with 59 percent of Conservatives, 56 percent of Liberal Democrats, 69 percent of Greens and 75 percent of Reform voters.

Public First carried out the survey, polling 2,000 British adults for the CDT in April and weighting the results to reflect the wider population. The margin of error is 2.2 percentage points.

Apple's withdrawal looms over the debate

The findings land amid a long-running collision between the UK government's appetite for encrypted data and the technology industry's insistence that encryption works best when nobody holds a spare key. That dispute became public when Apple withdrew its Advanced Data Protection feature from UK users after receiving a secret Technical Capability Notice under the Investigatory Powers Act. Apple challenged the order; the US government later said Britain had withdrawn its demand for access to Americans' encrypted data, but reports since have suggested another notice focused on British users.

Awareness of that row is limited: 55 percent of those polled had not heard about the Apple notice at all, and support stayed thin once the mechanism was described. Only 12 percent backed the government being able to secretly order companies to provide access to users' information while preventing them from revealing the order; a third said the government should not have that power at all, and 41 percent wanted greater transparency or parliamentary oversight.

Security weighed against law enforcement

Respondents were also unconvinced by the argument that such access is needed for law enforcement. 53 percent said the security risks of accessing encrypted messages outweighed the benefits, compared with 28 percent who thought the benefits came out on top. 84 percent worried that mechanisms allowing access could introduce vulnerabilities for hackers and criminals.