"A win for privacy" – Florida rejects the encryption backdoor law for social media

• Florida has rejected a bill to require mandatory encryption backdoors for social media
• The Social Media Use By Minors bill was "indefinitely postponed and withdrawn from consideration" on May 3, 2025
• Privacy experts have strongly criticized the proposal, warning that it would have made young people less safe instead

Florida has finally rejected a bill that would have required, among other things, mandatory encryption backdoors for all social media platforms that allow minors to open an account.

The "Social Media Use By Minors" bill came as a way to improve children's safety online and also included obligations to prevent minors from using ephemeral messaging features, while providing full access to their activities to parents and legal guardians. Yet, privacy experts have strongly criticized the proposal, warning that it would have made young people less safe instead.

On May 3, 2025, the bill was "indefinitely postponed and withdrawn from consideration," as indicated on the official Florida Senate's website.

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"A win for privacy"

Encryption is the technology used by secure messaging apps and the best VPN services to keep users' online activities private.

Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, and Instagram use end-to-end encryption to scramble all messages leaving a device in an unreadable form to prevent unauthorized access.

Florida lawmakers, however, wanted to force social media platforms "to provide a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption when law enforcement obtains a warrant or subpoena."

Yet, experts have long warned that it's impossible to create an encryption backdoor that only law enforcement can exploit, de facto undermining a crucial security feature for everyone.

Despite the Senate voting for the "Social Media Use By Minors" bill (SB 868/HB 743) to pass, Florida's House of Representatives blocked it on May 3.

Failing to attract the support of both legislative chambers means the proposal did not pass and was prevented from becoming law.

"In a win for privacy and encryption, the Florida Legislature ended its regular 2025 session on May 2 without passing SB 868 / HB 743," digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) commented the decsion in a tweet on May 5.

Experts at EFF have previously deemed the proposal "dangerous and dumb," arguing how lawmakers were "asking for the impossible" – an encryption backdoor only for minors that only good guys would have been able to use.

This is not the first time a similar bill failed to receive the needed majority to become law across the world.

In Europe, for example, France rejected the controversial encryption backdoor provision included in the Drug Trafficking Act in March on similar grounds.

The EU Commission also consistently fails to agree on what's been nicknamed Chat Control, a bill that would use mandatory scans of all citizens' chats in a bid to halt the spread of sexual abuse material.

Nonetheless, encryption remains at the crossroads globally – on one side, law enforcement sees it as an obstacle to criminal investigation, on the other, cybersecurity experts reiterate its importance for everyone's privacy and security online.

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