Turns out Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

Brits have delivered a fairly unambiguous verdict on giving the government access to their encrypted messages: no, thanks.

New polling commissioned by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) found that 93 percent of British adults believe they have a right to private conversations online, while 89 percent think nobody should be able to access their personal messages without a court order.

Perhaps more awkwardly for Westminster, two-thirds said they would not trust either the current government or any future one with the power to access encrypted messages.

That distrust crosses political lines.

Among people who voted in the 2024 general election, 58 percent of Labour voters said they wouldn't trust any government with the power, alongside 59 percent of Conservatives, 56 percent of Liberal Democrats, 69 percent of Greens and 75 percent of Reform voters.

Public First did the asking, polling 2,000 British adults for CDT in April and weighting the results to reflect the wider population.

The margin of error is 2.2 percentage points.

The findings land as the UK government's appetite for slurping encrypted data continues to collide with the tech industry's insistence that encryption works best when nobody has a spare key lying around.

That fight became particularly public when Apple withdrew Advanced Data Protection from UK users after receiving a secret Technical Capability Notice (TCN) under the Investigatory Powers Act.

Apple challenged the order, and while the US government later said Britain had withdrawn its demand for access to Americans' encrypted data, reports have since suggested another TCN was issued focusing on British users.

Despite the international row, 55 percent of those polled hadn't heard about the Apple notice at all.

Once presented with the idea, enthusiasm remained thin.

Just 12 percent backed the government being able to secretly order companies to provide access to users' information while preventing those companies from revealing the order.

A third said the government shouldn't have that power at all, while another 41 percent wanted greater transparency or parliamentary oversight.