Poll finds two-thirds of Brits distrust any UK government with access to encrypted messages

Nearly two-thirds of British adults say they would not trust any government, present or future, with the power to read encrypted messages, according to polling reported by The Register.

The survey was commissioned by the digital rights group Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and carried out by research firm Public First, which questioned 2,000 British adults in April. The results were weighted to reflect the wider population, with a margin of error of 2.2 percentage points. The findings land in the middle of a long-running confrontation between Westminster and technology companies over access to encrypted communications.

What the poll found

The headline numbers are emphatic. Ninety-three percent of respondents said people have a right to private conversations online, and 89 percent said nobody should be able to read personal messages without a court order. Two-thirds went further, telling pollsters they would not trust either the current government or any future one with the power to access encrypted chats.

Support for secret access orders was especially thin. Asked about the government's ability to quietly compel companies to hand over user information while preventing those companies from disclosing the demand, only 12 percent approved. A third said the state should not hold that power at all, and a further 41 percent said it should come with greater transparency or parliamentary oversight.

Respondents were also skeptical of trading security for law-enforcement access: 53 percent said the security risks of accessing encrypted messages outweigh the benefits, against 28 percent who took the opposite view. The concerns behind those positions were familiar ones. Eighty-four percent worried that mechanisms allowing access to encrypted messages could create openings for hackers and criminals, and 82 percent feared such powers could be abused.

Awareness of possible surveillance could also change behavior. Sixty-five percent said they would become more cautious about what they like, share or comment on, while 41 percent said they would hold back criticism of public institutions or government officials.

Distrust cuts across party lines

The reluctance was not confined to one political tribe. Among people who voted in the 2024 general election, 58 percent of Labour voters said they would not 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.

The Apple dispute in the background

The polling arrives amid a very public fight over the Investigatory Powers Act. As The Register reports, Apple withdrew its Advanced Data Protection feature from UK users after receiving a secret Technical Capability Notice under the act. Apple challenged the order, and although the US government later said Britain had withdrawn its demand covering Americans' encrypted data, subsequent reporting has suggested another notice was issued targeting British users.

Despite the international row, 55 percent of those polled had heard nothing about the Apple case at all. Even when the concept of secret access orders was put to them, enthusiasm stayed low.

CDT is not a neutral party in this debate: the organization campaigns for strong encryption and commissioned the research as part of that advocacy. The fieldwork itself, however, was conducted independently by Public First. Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said in response to the findings that the public grasps instinctively that private communication underpins individuality and a free society, and argued that weakening encryption in the name of targeting criminals ends up harming everyone's security.

Why it matters

These numbers will not by themselves end Westminster's pursuit of encrypted communications, but they undercut any claim that the public is enthusiastically behind it. They also give ammunition to technology companies and civil society groups arguing that backdoors and secret demands carry real costs, both to platform security and to how freely people speak online. If ministers intend to keep expanding investigatory powers, they now face polling suggesting that much of the electorate, across the voter bases of every major party, views those powers with suspicion rather than confidence. That gap between policy direction and public opinion is likely to shape the next round of the encryption debate, both in the UK and in the broader standoff between governments and messaging platforms over who holds the keys to private conversations.