In the last few years phones and apps have been touting themselves as better than other phones/services because their messaging has end-to-end encryption, or some other variant of secure messaging. Why do we care?
Edit: Thanks for the answers, everyone!
In: 140
You care because it guarantees the privacy of your communications. Including from the owner of the app you’re using.
When you send a letter, old type letter, would you feel your privacy has been violated if the mail company opens it, does whatever with it and then wraps it again in the same envelope with no way of knowing what happened?
End to end encryption is used to prevent this from happening but with electronic messages, from your end to the receivers end. It”s a way of making your letter only readable by the receiver and making the envelope tamper proof do you can now someone tried something bad to the letter. Same for the messages you receive
Let’s take WhatsApp as example but anything else would do. Your messages travel through the cell phone networks, other Internet backbones, they’re handled by computers owned by WhatsApp and stored there. In any of these places somebody can try to steal, read, tamper or interfere with your messages and encryption is there to prevent even WhatsApp from knowing what your message’s are.
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