The defence against this is widespread truly peer to peer messaging services, where there is no company at the middle to tell you add backdoors.
Who is working on that? I suspect the main challenge is not technical, but human - persuading users to switch messenger apps is almost impossible.
I genuinely wondered the other day how long before we see some country try to regulate the new self-hosted radio mesh messaging solutions like Meshtastic etc. Eventually some crime group somewhere is going to be busted using a homebrew encrypted radio system for messaging - they are so plentiful and easy to build with dirt cheap ESP32s etc, and it's so easy to deploy repeaters to extend range.
> https://meshtastic.org/
> The defence against this is widespread truly peer to peer messaging services
Spain would label you criminal for merely using alternative Android builds: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crim...
Simplex
https://simplex.chat/
Session was recently shut down due to lack of funding.
True P2P implies knowing the IP addresses of the people you're talking to.
Or it can be many-server, with tens of thousands of server operators and one selected at random.
Only the server operators then know your IP, and they don't know who you are or what you're saying.
Session was supposed to be shut down at start of July but looks like they got enough funding from donations to keep going for now.
Not P2P but Delta Chat
Or you can just host your own server like IRC. This is beyond idiotic, if they think that pedophiles will begin to suddenly use WhatsApp then I very much doubt about their basic literacy.
Such a weak reasoning and method which they used to push this is ridiculous agenda lead me to strongly suspect there must be something else behind it.