Five major US tech companies have written and filed an official letter to the UK Parliament asking it to reconsider upcoming plans to vote on a more intrusive Internet surveillance law.
The five are Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo, and they're part of the
Reform Government Surveillance (RGS) coalition that is actively fighting against the UK's Investigatory Powers Bill (IPB), currently up for public debate.
The companies are stating that if the UK approves this law and uses its powers to force companies to break their clients' encryption, it could damage their business.
Because there are laws around the world in contradiction to each other, laws that protect user privacy and totalitarian laws that give governments full access to user data, the five companies would be put in the undesired position of deciding in which country to break the law.
"We reject any proposals that would require companies to deliberately weaken the security of their products via backdoors, forced decryption, or any other means," the five companies say in their letter.
