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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Imagine you sent a letter to your friend. But instead of putting the letter in an envelope, you just taped it flat.
Every person who saw that letter could read it. Your next door neighbor, your mail person, all of the mail people in between your house and theirs, the recipient’s mail person, the recipient’s next door neighbor, the recipient’s house mates, and so on.
Sending a text message is similar, except it goes through a bunch of computers instead. Computers that you may or may not know what they’re actually doing.
It starts on your phone, then it goes to whatever WiFi you’re connected to, then the server of the company that made the app (where it could be read by the employees of that company for whatever reason), it might bounce between a few servers until it lands on the server the recipient has access to, then through whatever WiFi they’re on, then it’s on the recipient’s phone.
Every one of those stops is a point where someone could read that message. Those someone’s could be IT people doing work on the server, they could be employees looking for a reason to get even with their company, it could be some kid who’s hacked a server and is looking to “dox” someone, it could be a hacker who’s set up a fake WiFi access point to steal data, it could be a government agent. And you don’t want any of those people to have access to it.
The only people that should be able to read the message are you (and potentially anyone you show it to on your phone), and the recipient. The only way to allow that in computer-land is to put it in an “envelope” of sorts. And that envelope is called end-to-end encryption. It’s an envelope that only you and the recipient can open. Anyone who sees the message in between you two only sees a string of gibberish characters. Which is essentially meaningless to them.
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