As any regular reader of our news section here at CompuGram can’t but have failed to have noticed over the last 6 weeks, the ongoing legal feud between Apple and the FBI has been an omnipresent story that for a long time felt like it would go and on and on and on and on.
Apple’s steadfast refusal to comply with the US government’s order to unlock the San Bernadino terrorist iPhone sparked off a massive debate in the tech world about privacy, the rights of the individual and personal encryption.
But now the people at WhatsApp have added in built default end-to-end encryption for all of its messages. If anyone was still had any doubt as to what side of the fence the company was building its house on, they just got their answer.
“Recently there has been a lot of discussion about encrypted services and the work of law enforcement,” the company said in a statement on their website. “While we recognize the important work of law enforcement in keeping people safe, efforts to weaken encryption risk exposing people’s information to abuse from cyber criminals, hackers, and rogue states.”
The move to end-to-end encryption for all WhatsApp users now means that even if the tech messaging firm wanted to hand over information to a legal authority, it can’t.
As part of the announcement, the post on the WhatsApp website says:
“The idea is simple: when you send a message, the only person who can read it is the person or group chat that you send that message to. No one can see inside that message. Not cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us. End-to-end encryption helps make communication via WhatsApp private – sort of like a face-to-face conversation.”
WhatsApp is one of the few free communication platforms that now provides full end-to-end encryption that is switch on by default for everything WhatsApp related. The company also said that they fully expect encryption to ‘ultimately represent the future of personal communication.’
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