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You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/opinion/encryption-messaging-privacy-signal-whatsapp.html
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| One of the Last Bastions of Digital Privacy Is Under Threat | One of the Last Bastions of Digital Privacy Is Under Threat |
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| We might think of most of our day-to-day activities as private. Rarely is anyone deliberately eavesdropping on our conversations, spying on where we shop or following us on our commute. The government needs a search warrant or other court order to listen to our phone calls, to discover what books we checked out from the library or to read our mail. | We might think of most of our day-to-day activities as private. Rarely is anyone deliberately eavesdropping on our conversations, spying on where we shop or following us on our commute. The government needs a search warrant or other court order to listen to our phone calls, to discover what books we checked out from the library or to read our mail. |
| But a tsunami of digital tracking technology has made a large portion of our lives public by default. Nearly everything we do online and on our phones — our movements, our conversations, our reading, watching and shopping habits — is being watched by commercial entities whose data can often be used by governments. | But a tsunami of digital tracking technology has made a large portion of our lives public by default. Nearly everything we do online and on our phones — our movements, our conversations, our reading, watching and shopping habits — is being watched by commercial entities whose data can often be used by governments. |
| One of the last bastions of privacy is encrypted messaging programs such as Signal and WhatsApp. These apps, which employ a technology called end-to-end encryption, are designed so that even the app makers themselves cannot view their users’ messages. Texting on one of these apps — particularly if you use the “disappearing messages” feature — can be almost as private and ephemeral as most real-life conversations used to be. | One of the last bastions of privacy is encrypted messaging programs such as Signal and WhatsApp. These apps, which employ a technology called end-to-end encryption, are designed so that even the app makers themselves cannot view their users’ messages. Texting on one of these apps — particularly if you use the “disappearing messages” feature — can be almost as private and ephemeral as most real-life conversations used to be. |
| However, governments are increasingly demanding that tech companies surveil encrypted messages in a new and dangerous way. For years, nations sought a master key to unlock encrypted content with a search warrant but largely gave up because they couldn’t prove they could keep such a key safe from bad actors. Now they are seeking to force companies to monitor all their content, whether or not it is encrypted. | However, governments are increasingly demanding that tech companies surveil encrypted messages in a new and dangerous way. For years, nations sought a master key to unlock encrypted content with a search warrant but largely gave up because they couldn’t prove they could keep such a key safe from bad actors. Now they are seeking to force companies to monitor all their content, whether or not it is encrypted. |
| The campaign to institute mass suspicionless searches is global. In Britain, the Online Safety Bill, which is making its way through Parliament, demands that messaging services identify and remove child exploitation images, “whether communicated publicly or privately by means of the service.” In the United States, bills introduced in Congress require online services to identify and remove such images. And in the European Union, a leaked memo has revealed that many member countries support weakening encryption as part of the fight against child exploitation. | |
| This surge of regulatory efforts is part of a larger worldwide concern about the prevalence of child exploitation images online. Although substantiated cases of child sexual abuse have thankfully been on a steep decline in the United States — down 63 percent since 1990, according to the University of New Hampshire Crimes Against Children Research Center — the prevalence of sexual images of children circulating online has risen sharply, swamping the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline with 32 million reports in 2022. |