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!
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Think of it in physical mail terms: Unencrypted traffic would be like sending your hand written mail without an envelope. So your letter goes into the local mailbox. That mailman brings it to your own USPS station. That gets picked up and delivered to a regional node. Then it gets delivered to the regional node of your destination. Than it goes to the local USPS location, and then to your destination. It goes through many hops and changes hands among many different drivers and sorters along the way. Each hop could theoretically see it. Someone could intercept it and steal it and read the contents, etc.
End-to-End encryption is like sending your mail, in an envelope, written in a secret code, so that even if it gets intercepted, it’s gibberish. Only your friend on the receiving end has the decoder to turn it back into readable English.
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