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Op-Ed: This Washington Post article about encrypted communications did not age well

(James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. U.S. Air National Guard photo by Senior Airman Megan Floyd)

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Looking back at this 2016 article from The Washington Post, one really shouldn’t blame them for their optimism regarding WhatsApp’s “end-to-end encrypted” capabilities. The encryption (e.g. security) behind WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, is actually quite good at its core.

But what couldn’t have been so easily predicted by the Post is what I’ll call the “Facebook effect.” What I mean by that is any Facebook service has a single purpose: to collect information about you, whether personal information or generic metadata. It wants it all. It might be somewhat secure, but it certainly isn’t private.

‘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,’ WhatsApp co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton wrote in a blog post.”

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    Mason

    Nothing ages well in the digital realm anymore. Computing power, Artificial Intelligence, the rise of Graphics Processor Units (GPU’s) that scale massively, Quantum computing, etc. is just a self consuming flow of technology, it is a harsh mother, it eats its own.

  • Avatar
    JRomeoWhiskey

    Thank you Nick.