Facebook, Apple, Zoom, Microsoft and most other companies offering a digital communication platform use, or are rolling out, End-to-End Encryption. Why?
There are two versions of why; the PR version and the Real version.
- The PR version: We care about your privacy and therefore we are implementing End-to-End Encryption so that you can trust that we won’t be monitoring your conversations.
- The Real version: We’re implementing End-to-End Encryption so that when authorities tell us that our platform is being used for criminal activity we can simply raise our hands and say “Sorry guv, we have no idea what our platform is being used for”.
By implementing End-to-End Encryption these companies are washing their hands of any responsibility of how their platforms are being used and protect themselves from being complicit in enabling criminal activity.
Let’s be frank about this, End-to-End Encryption is not there to protect our privacy, after all any time we use our smartphones or services like Facebook, Google and Alexa, we have already gifted a lot of our information to these companies.
Do we really believe that our privacy is important these corporations?
In reality End-to-End Encryption doesn’t actually protect your privacy, just ask Jeff Bezos whose phone was hacked by MBS, or all the criminals and politicians who used EncroChat when the Gendarmerie hacked the network. If someone wants to know what you are doing, all they have to do is access your device where things are decrypted.
The real problem is that criminals don’t exclusively use one platform but rather jump around these platforms and unless they are targeted by authorities, they can do this with total impunity.
I am not advocating Big Brother here but rather a trust compromise. There are certain companies I trust and would trust them to monitor my activity without selling or abusing my data. Companies like:
- Mozilla foundation (Firefox browser).
- DuckDuckGo.com for searching.
- Signal app for messaging, even if they were to remove End-to-End Encryption.
It is for these reasons that we don’t have End-to-End Encryption at HaYa. When using HaYa you are incognito (that means that your identity is protected) but we do monitor the content of the conversations and if we do spot any illegal content, we block and delete it. Is this a perfect solution, of course not, but certainly it’s a step in the right direction.
