RELATED: What is encryption end-to-end encryption? This post isn’t about pounding the big five for their business model but rather providing the solution.
How else would the business model of a platform acquired by Facebook, one of the biggest online advertising companies, be of value with a free service if not for some way or another connecting your aggregated metadata with Facebook? But enough of that. What about Whatsapp with its end-to-end encryption mechanism, you wonder? As shown previously, Whatsapp stores a lot of metadata about you and your activities. In a sense, you are the product.īut that’s not all, these services having full access to your data also means that they can and are obliged, under certain circumstances, to share your data with law enforcement institutions, like the police, FBI, and other well-known three letter agencies. Consequently, you have to pay for the “free service” these companies provide with your private data, habits, likes and dislikes and more. Well, for starters, while SSL encryption prevents third parties and malicious actors from reading your messages on the fly in a so-called man-in-the-middle attack, service providers like your ISP, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, and in the case of SMS messages your mobile carrier, have access to your full unencrypted texts and messages, shared media files, contacted parties, and voice calls. Why not use Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Skype, or even Whatsapp you ask? Aren’t they SSL encrypted? No one can access our data in transition, right? And Whatsapp at least is even end-to-end encrypted. Privacy breaches and shady uses of our data have become so ubiquitous that using a rigorously secure messaging app should already have become a no-brainer for everyone. It doesn’t matter whether you are an activist in a police state, a tech-savvy young individual who cares about their privacy, a professional with business secrets of value, or a soon-to-be mother who cares to keep her data private from advertising companies.
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