Its head, Will Cathcart, said it would refuse to comply if asked to weaken the privacy of encrypted messages. The charity's Richard Collard said the Online Safety Bill "will rightly make it a legal requirement for platforms to identify and disrupt child sexual abuse taking place on their sites and services and companies could be preparing by developing technological solutions that protect the safety and privacy of all users, not least that of child abuse victims". And Mr Cathcart asked: "If companies installed software on to people's phones and computers to scan the content of their communications against a list of illegal content, what happens when other countries show up and give a different list of illegal content?"Dr Monica Horten, of digital-rights campaigners the Open Rights Group, said: "With over 40 million users of encrypted chat services in the UK, this turns it into a mass-surveillance tool, with potentially damaging consequences for privacy and free-expression rights