Another day, another flavor of well-meaning but poorly designed bills around child safety. This most recent attempt comes in the form of a proposed bill in Florida that steps into the debate over end-to-end encryption between privacy advocates and law enforcement. Despite the good intentions of lawmakers that rightly want to make it easier for law enforcement to solve crimes involving minors, it does not change the technological reality that allowing any backdoor into encrypted communications would make everyone less secure and break one of the most important privacy-protected means of communication in the modern world.
Florida is currently considering two bills that would require social media companies to provide a means to break end-to-end encryption in social media messages if subpoenaed by a court in a criminal case involving a minor.
The basic idea of end-to-end encryption is pretty simple: messages, sensitive financial information, or other types of data are changed from a readable format into a format that can only be read by a specific decryption key when sent between devices. That key then changes it back into a readable format on the other end of the exchange. Encryption helps protect sensitive information from hackers and data leaks. If it is difficult or nearly impossible to decipher intercepted data, the potential personal or financial risks from hackers are minimized.
The whole process requires careful balancing to ensure the right people have the keys and that the algorithm encrypting the data does so in a way that guarantees its security. The end result is that anyone without a key cannot read what is sent and received. Everything from text messages to credit card numbers used for online purchases are protected by some version of this technology.
Florida politicians are not the first to want to create a backdoor for law enforcement into this seemingly impenetrable security method. As part of the long debate balancing privacy and security, end-to-end encryption has found itself in the spotlight before. The International Association of Chiefs of Police describe how criminals often use this technology to “go dark” and how it can be used to shield bad actors. Allowing a backdoor for law enforcement seems like a natural exemption to privacy especially if the proper procedures have been followed.
Unfortunately, it is widely considered technologically impossible to both create a backdoor for law enforcement and also maintain the same degree of privacy from end-to-end encryption. Creating a backdoor in the encryption process would create a dedicated access point that would be vulnerable to hackers who could focus their efforts on the single point of weakness. If the backdoor were breached, it would provide an easier way to decrypt the messages that could be shared as easily as any piece of software. In other words, a backdoor for police would not only be accessible to the proper authorities but also increase hacker risks and leave everyone more vulnerable. This was put on display in 2024 when foreign hackers gained access to sensitive information by exploiting a government-mandated backdoor for law enforcement in U.S. telecom companies.
Technology companies rightly take the security of encryption very seriously. In response to a recent UK law requiring Apple to create a backdoor into its encryption on iPhones for law enforcement, the company outright ended the use of the encryption feature in the country rather than let the security of their product be compromised worldwide.
Now Florida is wading into this debate with misguided proposals of their own that would leave everyone less secure. This not only includes minors in Florida using social media platforms but also anyone using the encryption on the social media platform. Rather than a unique key to decipher encrypted messages, a government-mandated backdoor would be a skeleton key that would be able to let anyone who has it into private messages. Besides, if agencies have access to the physical phone, they can already access messages without breaking end-to-end encryption through commercial unlocking tools. There is no need to break encryption for everyone.
In the end, Florida’s encryption legislation does little to improve children’s safety and will likely make everyone less secure online, pitting safety against technological reality. Encryption is key to security on the internet and allowing anyone, even law enforcement, to break it will leave everyone’s privacy more vulnerable.
Trey Price is a policy analyst with the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, follow us on X @ConsumerPal.